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CLEAR GRIT 

A COLLECTION OF 

LECTURES, ADDRESSES AND POEMS 



BY 



ROBERT COLLYER 



EDITED BY 

JOHN HA YNES HOLMES 








BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1913 



75)3^ 



Ct 



\n 



Copyright, 1913 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 



DEC 26 1913 



©C!.A3588 6 5 



\ 



INTRODUCTION 

The contents of this volume comprise a selec- 
tion of Dr. CoUyer's best known lectures, and a 
small group of ballads and hymns. The poems, 
with the exception of the one entitled " Lucretia 
Mott," have been printed many times and in 
widely different places ; but the lectures, with the 
exception of " Clear Grit," although delivered 
again and again from pulpit and platform, have 
never before been published. This book, there- 
fore, from the standpoint of the printed word at 
least, may be described with perfect truth as new. 

The lectures may be roughly classified into two 
groups. On the one hand, there are the lectures 
which were specifically written for use upon the 
so-called Lyceum platform — of which Dr. Coll- 
yer was one of the most popular figures in the 
latter years of its power and prosperity — and 
which were delivered therefore to enormous audi- 
ences in all parts of the country. Of the lectures 
included in this volume, "Clear Grit," "The 
Human George Washington " and " Robert 
Burns " are to be ranked as the distinctive 
members of this group. 

How he came to enter the public lecture field, 
and remain there for a period of time, is told us 



INTRODUCTION 

by Dr. Colljer in the closing pages of his charm- 
ing autobiographical volume, " Some Memories." 
For some winters prior to the great fire in Chi- 
cago, he had lectured " through the Redpath 
Bureau in Boston, to (his) great satisfaction and 
profit." This work was purely incidental, how- 
ever, to his professional activities as minister of 
Unity Church, and during the period when the 
great new building was under way, was given 
up altogether. In 1871 came the fire, in which 
church and home and personal property were all 
alike destroyed, and the resulting problem of 
beginning life anew both as man and minister. 
An especial worry was the new home for the wife 
and children, which " we found after a while we 
were not able to finish save by a heavy mortgage." 
" In this strait," says the Doctor, " the Redpath 
Bureau offered me work through a whole winter, 
if I could take it at prices I had never com- 
manded. So I told my people how we stood. 
The work would pay for the home if I would take 
it in about six months ; and, if they would give 
me my time, my stipend they had then begun to 
pay should be used for the supply of the pulpit, 
and would command the best men they could lay 
their hands on. So they voted me my vacation, 
and I went into the work with all good will from 
early in November, 1872, to well on in May, 1873, 
lecturing from Belfast in Maine to far away in 
Minnesota, and do not remember missing an ap- 
pointment, nor did those who came to hear me 



INTRODUCTION 

seem to notice my poverty in elocution and the 
like. I would preach also on the Sunday now 
and then, and came out at the end of all my labor 
safe and sound, with money to pay for the new 
home far more ample than the one we had lost." 
It was for this tour that these lectures were pre- 
pared; and in this tour that they were delivered 
literally scores of times to enthusiastic audiences 
in city, town and village. 

The second group, which includes the majority 
of the lectures gathered in this volume, had an 
altogether different origin. In his work both in 
Chicago and in New York, Dr. Collyer made it 
his custom to conduct services on Sunday evenings 
as well as on Sunday mornings. For these even- 
ings he early fell into the habit of preparing ad- 
dresses which were more of the lecture than the 
sermon type. Talks on travel at home and 
abroad, biographical studies of great leaders of 
thought and action, current happenings in the 
world of affairs, personal reminiscences of men 
and events — these were the subjects which he 
discussed at his evening services — and abundant 
was the wealth of information, anecdote, observa- 
tion and experience that he poured forth from 
week to week. Here his reading in many fields, 
but especially in the literature of biography, 
history and legend, stood him in good stead, his 
wonderfully retentive memory yielding ample 
material for any subject that he might select for 
treatment. Rich and deep also were his resources 



INTRODUCTION 

of personal experience. To visit a cathedral or 
to meet a distinguished man was to have an ad- 
dress all prepared for future delivery in the well- 
loved pulpit, just so soon as the time could be 
found for putting pen to paper. Thus Sunday 
after Sunday, through many years of untiring 
service, the evening lectures poured forth, and 
great were the multitudes who came to drink 
at this living spring of instruction and inspira- 
tion. 

Most of the lectures, which were prepared and 
delivered for this purpose, were either burned in 
the Chicago conflagration and the later fire-dis- 
aster in New York, or else destroyed deliberately 
by Dr. Collyer himself. Those remaining and 
gathered here in this volume were perhaps the 
ones which the Doctor regarded as of special in- 
terest or worth; but m9re likely were the ones 
which he found useful for delivery on other oc- 
casions than those for which they had been pre- 
pared, and thus fortunately preserved. In nearly 
every case, however, the manuscript is the one 
carefully written in his own hand for the Sun- 
day evening service for which it was originally 
prepared, with few corrections or additions of 
any kind. It is remarkable, when we remember 
that these lectures were dashed off in the brief 
space between one Sunday and another, in the 
feverish haste with which the busy parish minister 
has to do all work of this kind, to note the beauty 
of style, the wealth of accurate information and 



INTRODUCTION 

racy anecdote, and the well-rounded form, by 
which they are uniformly characterized. 

Nearly all the lectures in this volume are to be 
classified in one or the other of these two groups 
which I have noted. Two exceptions are " Some 
Old Unitarian Worthies " and " James Marti- 
neau." The former is an address especially pre- 
pared for a meeting of the Unitarian Club of New 
York; and the latter is a sermon preached 
at the Church of the Messiah shortly after the 
death of the great English Unitarian. 

It needs but a casual reading of these lectures, 
to gain an understanding of Dr. CoUyer's popular 
power both in the pulpit and on the platform. 
There may well be some dispute as to the amount 
of truth contained in Dr. Collyer's confession of 
his " poverty in elocution and the like," but there 
can be no difference of opinion, I take it, as to 
certain other elements of his work, which were 
altogether remarkable. 

Thus, in the first place, there is that matchless 
English style which needs no tribute of mine at 
this belated hour. Every competent judge has 
borne enthusiastic testimony to its rare qualities 
of simplicity and purity; but all too few have 
paused to see that, while it had these qualities to 
perfection, it had other qualities as well, which 
gave it an almost unique distinction. The spoken 
and written style of many a man has been pure, 
but has also been weak, tame and characterless. 
Simplicity has been frequently achieved, but only 



INTRODUCTION 

in combination with coldness, austerity and re- 
serve. The miracle of Dr. Collyer's style was its 
union of purity and simplicity, with warmth, 
color, variety, fancy, and indubitable strength. 
His style was essentially that of the poet, and it 
was wafted from his lips like the songs of the 
birds, the fragrance of spring flowers, or a fresh 
breeze from a Yorkshire moor. The people list- 
ened to his words as eagerly as yeomen of old 
time to a minstrel-song, or as children to a 
nursery-tale. They came to hear him first of all 
because they knew that they would be entertained 
and charmed by what the speaker said and the 
way he said it ; and they went away, almost with- 
out knowing it, instructed, purified and inspired. 
In the second place, we feel all through these 
lectures the romantic atmosphere which sur- 
rounded the life and personality of the man who 
wrote and delivered them. This fact is much 
more apparent in certain other lectures of a 
largely autobiographical character which have 
been reserved for publication in a later volume, 
but in these much less personal writings, it is still 
very emphatically present. Dr. Collyer's great- 
est asset as a minister, perhaps, was his career 
before entering the pulpit. His life-story ex- 
erted a magical fascination over his own gener- 
ation, and in our time has taken on the form of 
a classic tradition, or even " folk-legend." What 
this meant to his audiences is still apparent in the 



INTRODUCTION 

printed words of these lectures. All through 
them we see the Yorkshire peasant who tramped 
the moors, the Yorkshire blacksmith who smote 
the anvil, and the Yorkshire Methodist who 
preached the word. Detached as they are in 
theme from all necessary elements of personality, 
these lectures are still as much the fruit of this 
particular experience, as the apple is the fruit of 
the apple-tree. Not one line of them could have 
been written by any other man, nor even by this 
man in any other environment. They are " Coll- 
yer " through and through. In this fact, not 
less than in the style, is the secret of their power 
when delivered on the platform yesterday, and 
their permanent interest when read in the library 
to-day. 

But there is more than merely " Collyer " in 
these lectures ; there is humanity as well. Here is 
not merely an extraordinary man speaking out 
of a unique experience; but man himself speaking 
out of the universal experiences of the human 
heart. These lectures show, as Dr. Collyer's ser- 
mons have shown long since in equal measure, all 
of that wonderful human quality which permeated 
everything that he ever did. In life, in thought, 
in word, in deed — in his character as a man, a 
minister and a lecturer, Dr. Collyer was preemi- 
nently human, and great just because so human. 
As John Chadwick put it so delightfully, in his 
anniversary poem: 



INTRODUCTION 

" You are so human ; here's the central fact 
Of which your hfe and speech are all compact: 
All things that touch the simple common 

heart — 
These have you chosen — these, the better 
part — 
You are so human; feeling, thought, and act." 

If any demonstration were needed at this late day 
of the truth of this remarkable fact, we have it 
in abundance in the contents of this volume. To 
any coldly critical mind, it must be an altogether 
amazing experience to read these lectures on old, 
trite, well-worn themes, and see how delightfully 
fresh and original they are. " George Washing- 
ton," "Westminster Abbey," "The Pilgrims," 
"William EUery Channing," "Robert Bums," 
" Hawthorne " — how can anything be spoken or 
written to-day on these familiar topics which can 
be in any sense new, and thus worthy of being 
printed and preserved? And yet, as we turn 
these pages one by one, we find that everything 
is apparently as novel as though the subjects dis- 
cussed had never before been treated. And the 
explanation, to my mind, lies wholly in the Doc- 
tor's method of approach. He wrote not as a 
critic, or a student, or a philosopher, but simply 
as a man, who loved the world because it was the 
home of men, and loved men themselves because of 
the human nature there was in them. Read the 



INTRODUCTION 

essay on " Westminster Abbey," and see how he 
makes the old building echo anew with the laugh- 
ter and tears of the human experience that went 
into its building. Read the lecture on " The Pil- 
grims," and see how triumphantly he humanizes 
these lay-figures of our early history. Read the 
study of " Charles Lamb," or that of " Burns," 
or that of " Hawthorne," and see if you do not 
understand these men with a new insight and love 
them with a fresh affection. Especially read the 
great lecture on " George Washington," and then 
ask yourself if you have ever met this man be- 
fore. Turn all the pages of this book, and see 
how every sentence is pregnant with admiration for 
human virtue and pity for human frailty. Every- 
where shines the light of " the understanding 
heart." And in this, more than in all things 
else, lies the secret of his power. Men and women 
heard Dr. Collyer gladly, on whatever theme he 
might be talking, for this reason — that they felt 
instinctively his human kinship with themselves, 
and through him were made to feel the kinship of 
the world. These lectures, like the man, are 
" human " — hence their abiding power over the 
souls of men. 

The style, the man behind, and the human 
nature in and through — these were the qualities 
which combined to make these lectures so abun- 
dantly successful in their day. In our time, when 
the hand which wrote them is palsied and the 
tongue which spoke them silent, these qualities 



INTRODUCTION 

still abide, to make them a perennial source of 
delight and inspiration. 

A word should perhaps be added here in re- 
gard to the poems assembled in this volume. Of 
the two hymns, one, " Unto thy temple. Lord, we 
come," has long since gained a permanent place 
in the hymnology of all Christian communions in 
this country and in England. The other, which 
is equally fine as a poem, has remained compar- 
atively unknown, only because written for a very 
special and altogether extraordinary occasion. 
Of the three ballads, " Under the Snow " is un- 
doubtedly the best known, and has won a perma- 
nent place in our literature by being included in 
E. C. Stedman's " American Anthology," where it 
is described as that " beautiful ballad." The 
other ballads are to my mind not at all inferior to 
this favorite. All are characterized by a truly 
remarkable beauty of form and vigor of expression. 
The lines on " Lucretia Mott " are perhaps more 
interesting from the personal than the literary 
point of view. The six poems taken together 
represent all the work that Dr. Colly er ever did in 
this field. One cannot study this little group, it 
seems to me, without lamenting that the writer did 
not more often turn to poetry as a medium of ex- 
pression. A great poet, as well as a great preacher 
and lecturer, was in him ! 

In closing this brief word of introduction, may 
I be pardoned if I state how great has been my 
joy in the work of preparing this book for publi- 



INTRODUCTION 

cation. For seven happy years, it was my privi- 
lege to be associated with Dr. CoHyer in the 
ministry of the Church of the Messiah, and to 
receive at his hands such " a providence of love " 
as revealed, not at all the measure of my deserts, 
but the unfathomable depths of his gracious and 
forgiving spirit. Now, when he is gone, it has 
been my privilege to read his precious manu- 
scripts, and thus to live again for many hours 
together in the atmosphere of his sweet and radi- 
ant soul. One cannot go through such an ex- 
perience as this, as one could not live from day 
to day in Dr. Collyer's own presence, without be- 
ing refreshed, cleansed, and uplifted. Hence my 
everlasting gratitude to Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. 
Collyer, who entrusted l^his task to my hands, and 
thus enriched my life. 

John Haynes Holmes. 
Church of the Messiah, 
New York City. 
October, 1913. 



CONTENTS 

I 
LECTURES AND ADDRESSES 

PAGE 

Clear Grit 1 

Cathedrals 40 

Westminster Abbey 54 

The Pilgrims 74 

The Human George Washington .... 91 
The Human Heart of Martin Luther . .114 

Some Old Unitarian Worthies 133 

Theophilus Lindsey 154 

William Ellery Channing 168 

James Martineau 186 

Robert Burns 206 

Charles and Mary Lamb 231 

Charles Lamb : Genius AND Humor .... 248 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 264 

John Greenleaf Whittier 277 

Henry David Thoreau 294 

II 

POEMS 

Saxon Grit 313 

Under the Snow 317 

The Legend of the Two Kings . . . . 320 

Hymn 326 

Hymn 327 

lucretia mott 328 



I 

LECTURES AND ADDRESSES 



CLEAR GRIT 

Clear Grit, as I understand it, and propose to 
speak of it in this lecture, may be defined as the 
best there is in a man, blossoming into the best he 
can do in a sweet and true fashion, as a rose blos- 
soms on a bush or a bird sings in a tree. 

It is that fine quality in a man or woman that 
can never give way except in a true fashion and 
for good reason ; the power to walk barefoot over 
the flints that lie on the true line of life, rather 
than to go through soft and flowery ways that de- 
flect from it. 

Clear Grit is the power to say No to what may 
seem to be a multitude of angels when they would 
counsel you away from a downright loyalty to 
your instant duty ; while if it were possible for you 
to feel that by following steadily the true path, 
for all that you can see, you will go into outer 
darkness and stay there, but that unspeakable 
felicity may crown the false way, to make no argu- 
ment about one way or the other, but simply to 
determine once for all that any torment for being 
a true man or woman is to be preferred to any 
bliss for failing. 

Now, you will understand from this, of course, 
that there is a false and a true in Grit, as there is 

1 



a CLEAR GRIT 

in all great and good things in creation, and that 
we need to know the one from the other, as the 
prime condition of being Clear Grit at all. In 
Westall's splendid designs for " Paradise Lost," 
if you have ever seen them, you will remember 
that in one of them Satan, as he stands on the 
burning mount with his hand lifted and shouts 
to his fallen host, is still a mighty angel, erect and 
strong, and not to be distinguished from his un- 
fallen peers, except for the shadow that begins to 
pass over his face out of his darkened soul. 

It is the painter's way of telling a truth we have 
all seen some time in our life, — the truth men like 
Aaron Burr and Lord Byron, and others I might 
name, have made clear to us through their lives, — 
that there is nothing in this world so nearly like a 
splendid angel as a splendid devil. 

When I worked at the anvil, as a boy, we would 
sometimes show the boys who came in with their 
horses to shoe, a great wonder. We would take a 
nail-rod and make it white hot ; but then, instead 
of making a nail, we would plunge the iron, hot as 
it was, into a pan of brimstone, and it would turn 
to mere slag. 

It was the truth I want to teach about Clear Grit 
in a crucible. The substance out of which you 
can forge all sorts of noble things shall be in two 
men just about alike, and in both it shall be ca- 
pable of growing white hot under some intense 
pressure of soul or circumstance. But one man 
shall dip this substance of his manhood into some 



CLEAR GRIT 3 

infernal element and it will all turn to cinder, 
while the other man will make what will be like a 
nail in a sure place. 

So Clear Grit, as I think of it, is never base or 
mean, either in its nature or tendency. What- 
ever it may be that you compress into this com- 
pact vernacular of two syllables, here is the point 
where you get at the rights of it; the scratch of 
the diamond that cuts into everything except a 
diamond. 

A man may have all sorts of shining qualities; 
he may be as handsome as Apollo, as plausible as 
Mercury, and as full of fight as Mars, yet this 
shall show 3^ou, when you scratch him, he is a bit 
of mere shining paste and no diamond at all. Or 
his faults and failings may be an everlasting regret 
to those who love him best, as they are in a man 
like Robert Burns. But because there's Clear 
Grit in him, because there's a bit of manhood run- 
ning through his life, as grand and good as ever 
struggled through this world of ours toward a 
better; a heart that could gather everything that 
lives within the circle of its mighty sympathy, 
from a mouse shivering down there in the furrow, 
to a saint singing up yonder in Heaven ; because 
there's a heart like that in him, we cling to his 
knees, we will not let him go ; sin-smitten, but 
mighty, manful man as he is, we gather him into 
our heart, every one of us, and love him with an 
everlasting love. 

Then, as I am led to see how Clear Grit comes 



4 CLEAR GRIT 

to be an intimate part of your life and mine, I 
have to trace the root of it, first of all, to a cer- 
tain austerity and self-denial in our personal char- 
acter and life. There was a story many years 
ago going the rounds of our papers, about a black 
man who was traveling on one of the Sound steam- 
ers from New York to Boston, and found there was 
no room for him in a stateroom, upstairs or down, 
and no such chance of his getting comfortably 
through the night as there would have been for a 
decent yellow dog. It was a wild night, and was 
getting dark, when one of the officers on the 
steamer found this man trying to make the best 
of it in as snug a corner as he could find, pitied 
his forlorn condition and thought he would try to 
help him. He noticed he was not so very black, 
so he hit on a plan for giving him a stateroom. 
There would be no sort of trouble about an Indian 
if he should come and look as well, generally, as 
this negro did. And so he said to himself, " I 
will run him in as an Indian." He went up to the 
man, looked him in the eyes, and said : " You are 
an Indian, ain't you ? " 

Well Douglass, for it was Fred, saw in an in- 
stant what the man was after. I don't know how 
he felt, but I know exactly how I should have felt 
if I had been in his place. I should have felt like 
giving a little nod, and saying, " Well, yes, I guess 
I'm an Indian." But what this black man did was 
to look right back into the eyes of the officer, and 
say, " No, I'm a nigger," to curl himself up as 



CLEAR GRIT 5 

the officer turned and left him, and get what com- 
fort he could in his gusty nest. 

Now there you touch the first thing I know of in 
Clear Grit, and that is the power and the will to 
say No to every temptation toward a good time 
that can come between a man and his manhood. 

And I think these temptations usually begin 
down among our passions and appetites. I sup- 
pose it is not a rule without an exception that the 
man who cares most of all about himself cares very 
little about anybody else ; or that in proportion to 
the fuss a man makes about his dinner, for in- 
stance, is the utter worthlessness of that man to 
have any decent woman cook for him. I think a 
very fair sort of man may sometimes make a fuss 
about his dinner, and my dear wife thought so, 
too. Isaac Walton said, " that very good dishes 
should only be eaten by very good men," and 
that's the reason I have sometimes thought that 
wjien we ministers go round to one of the best 
houses in the parish about tea time, as we some- 
times do, and are invited to stay to tea, which we 
generally do, the good lady is sure to bring out 
her best cakes and preserves and to broil her 
tenderest chicken. She knows what dear old Wal- 
ton knew, that very good things should only be 
eaten by very good men, so the minister gets them, 
of course, and thinks, no doubt, as St. Thomas 
a Becket thought, when a man saw him eating the 
breast of a pheasant as if he liked it very much, 
and said to him sourly : " That is no dinner for a 



6 CLEAR GRIT 

saint of the church." " One man," the saint re- 
phed, " may be a glutton on horse beans, while 
another man may eat the breast of a pheasant like 
a gentleman, and be a good man all the same." 

All this is true, of course, but it is no less true 
that the devouring determination in a great ma- 
jority of men and women nowadays to have a 
good time in getting every good thing they hanker 
after, and dirt cheap at that, if they can, is one 
of the most dangerous evils we have to encounter 
if we want, above all things in this world, to be 
Clear Grit. " It is a fortunate thing for the 
world," a man of another race and nation said to 
Thomas Guthrie, the fine old Scotchman, " that 
you Anglo-Saxons eat and drink so much, be- 
cause you have such a genius for hard work and 
for going ahead in everything you take hold of, 
that, if it were not for this, the nations round 
about would have no chance to compete with you. 
You would be the masters of the world." Well, 
it was true, no doubt, and only one truth of a 
good many that belong to this side of our char- 
acter and our life. 

Now, let us see how this works. I went to live 
in Chicago when the population numbered about a 
hundred thousand souls. I lived there twenty 
years, so that I was quite intimate with the life 
of that great city. In the early times I think I 
knew every man who had come to the front, and 
was wielding a real poAver of any sort for good. I 
do not remember one among them who did not 



CLEAR GRIT 7 

begin his life as a poor man's son. They all came 
up, so far as I could trace them, without any good 
time at all, except as boys ought to have a good 
time in growing strong as a steel bar on plenty of 
wholesome work and what we should call hard 
fare ; fighting their way to an education through a 
great deal of effort, and then, when they were 
ready, coming out West from the East with that 
half-dollar in their pocket, and that little lot of 
things done up in a valise that you will notice 
every young fellow is said to start with, who ends 
by making his mark or making a fortune. 

So a great German writer says that riches are 
always harder on youth than poverty and that 
many a man sees now he would not for much 
money have had much money in his youth. " When 
we started the * Edinburgh Review,' " Sidney 
Smith says, " we thought of putting this motto 
on the cover : ' We cultivate literature on a little 
oatmeal,' but it was so literally true that we con- 
cluded not to tell." 

And John Bryant, of Princeton, in Illinois, told 
me once that when his brother, William Cullen 
Bryant, was a young man, he durst not have taken 
a five years' lease of his life ; but William, he said, 
adopted the habits of a Spartan, omitting, of 
course, the stealing. He would take some brown 
bread and butter, with a glass of milk or water, 
for his breakfast, then he would do a bit of real 
hard work, and then go down to his office ; and, 
with very little alteration, John thought he was 



8 CLEAR GRIT 

keeping up that habit down to the time we had 
the talk, and thought also that this had a great 
deal to do with both the length and the worth of 
his brother's most noble career. " I shall be glad 
if you will stay and dine with me, but when my 
wife is away, I just browse around," Mr. Lincoln 
said once to a friend when he was President of the 
Republic and living in the White House in Wash- 
ington. " Just browse around ! " How much 
that fine temperance in eating and drinking, and 
in all the habits of his life, had to do with the 
man's Clear Grit we can only or hardly guess. 
And, so, turn where you will, I think you are sure 
to touch this as one of the first things in Clear 
Grit : " to make much of myself, I must make 
sure of myself in my power to say No to these 
good servants but bad masters, my passions and 
appetites." 

We all know, however, there must be more than 
this to make a man Clear Grit. The power must 
begin there, but it cannot end there. There are 
hosts of men who have this quality, so far as I 
have tried to touch it. They are hardy and tem- 
perate, they have pluck and courage, but not an 
atom of it is used for any other purpose than to 
serve some end of their own. And so the}^ may 
become simply so many instances of the truth I 
have told already that there is nothing in this 
world so like a splendid angel as a splendid 
devil. 

And so the next thing we want to make Clear 



CLEAR GRIT 9 

Grit is the power and the will to help others even 
more than you help yourself. When George Pea- 
body died the Queen of England sorrowed with 
thousands more for that great, generous banker. 
But another man died about the same time in 
England for whom no tears were shed except by a 
few friends who knew him and loved him, but who 
did better still with his money than Peabody. 
This man was Faraday, the prince of chemists in 
his time. It came out after his death that as far 
back as 1832 Faraday's income was about £5,000 
a year, and he could easily have made it ten or 
fifteen thousand, but from that time he gave up 
his whole income, except enough to keep himself 
and his family in good ease, that he might devote 
his whole time to the great science in which he was 
such a master, and in that way enrich the whole 
world. He died a poor man, when, I suppose, he 
might have been a millionaire, but then the world 
was richer by untold milhons for what the man 
had done. 

That is the second thing in Clear Grit. After 
the power to save yourself comes the power to 
give yourself. 

There is an old city in France, where, down to 
the middle of the last century, the people had to 
depend upon the wells for their water. But one 
dry summer these wells gave out, and there was 
hardly any water to be found. In a poor hovel 
at that time a child lay sick of a fever, moaning 
for water, and the mother had none to give him. 



10 CLEAR GRIT 

He worried through, however, and grew to be a 
man. But then it was found that he was a miser, 
the closest and most niggardly man ever heard of 
in that town. He lived alone in the most miserable 
fashion and he was so unpopular with the folks 
that the boys would hoot him and pelt him as he 
went along the street. Then he died, and it was 
found that he had left an enormous fortune, every 
penny of which was to go for a grand system of 
water works, and from that fountain the water 
pours plentifully into every home down to this 
day. 

There you touch the second thing in Clear 
Grit — the power to help others, no matter what 
it may cost you, when the thing faces you as a 
clear duty. Every ounce of the power that man 
had, from the day he made his resolution to the 
day he died, went into Clear Grit, so he was a 
miser and a martyr together, and I think some- 
times that when the poor soul went out of him, all 
crippled, as it must have been, by that stern 
struggle to save money through all those years, it 
was very beautiful to those who watched him from 
above and knew all about it. Just as when we 
still see, on our streets or in their homes, the men 
that came back to us all broken from the war for 
the Republic, we feel that no perfection in form 
or feature can ever be robed to us in such a noble 
beauty as the scarred faces and shorn trunks of 
our boys in blue. 

And this brings me to the last thing I want to 



CLEAR GRIT 11 

touch in this exposition of Clear Grit. When a 
man has these two things in his Hfe — first, the 
power to save himself, and then the power to give 
himself — and he sees something to be done and 
knows he ought to do it, he never stops to count 
the cost, but, as we say, he pitches right in and 
does it there and then. That was w^hat our sol- 
diers did, what the old miser did, what Faraday 
did, and what all men do who show their Clear 
Grit right through. There it stands, the thing 
to be done, and there is the man with the Grit to 
do it. Something comes into him — he cannot 
tell you what. He wonders very likely, after it's 
all done, how he did it, but then it's done once and 
forever. The power has possessed him as Italy 
possessed Garibaldi, as Germany possessed Bis- 
marck, as Methodism possessed Wesley, as freedom 
for the slave possessed Garrison, and as honesty 
possessed Abraham Lincoln. It comes and fills 
the heart, as the sight of the young maiden fills the 
heart of the young man who goes into a room at 
7 o'clock this evening, with a heart as free as that 
of an unmated swallow, meets a girl he never saw 
before, and at 10 o'clock that evening comes out 
of that room a captive for life. 

And once let this power take hold of such a 
man, then he cares nothing about what risk he has 
to run or how hard it is to do — he puts on the 
steam and goes ahead and does it. I well remem- 
ber in our great fire in Chicago, a slender young 
man who undertook to carry a lady and her little 



12 CLEAR GRIT 

child in a light buggy out of the burning city. 
He was going down Michigan Avenue, the street 
was crowded to a jam, and he had to stop and 
wait for the jam to get loose. All at once there 
came along behind him a great fellow driving a 
furniture wagon, who yelled to him with an oath 
to get out of the way or he would run into him. 
" I cannot stir," the man said quietly, " and this 
lady is sick and has a little babe with her not a 
week old. Now, you must be quiet and stay where 
you are, and we will all come out together very 
soon." Then the brute swore a great oath that 
he would come down and pull him out of that and 
twist the thing out of his way. He jumped out 
of his wagon to do it. The young man jumped 
too. They were both on the ground at the same 
instant, but before the giant had time to strike 
him or clutch him, the young man had sent his 
fist about where the brute's dinner would go if he 
could get any that day, and that brought him 
down. But as he was coming down, he caught 
him with the other fist right under the chin, and 
that brought him up. " Now," he said, " you 
get on to that wagon and do just as I tell you, or 
I will give you the greatest licking you ever had 
since you were born." The fellow swore horribly, 
mounted the wagon, and drove down the avenue 
at the back of the buggy when the jam gave way. 
But the best of the story is this, and I can vouch 
for its truth, that this young man was a minister 
in our city, in good standing, a mighty man in 



CLEAR GRIT IS 

preaching and prayer, as I know, a man who 
wouldn't hurt a mouse, and in every way a gentle- 
man. But the Clear Grit in him at that dire 
moment could only show itself in the one way ; and 
there it was. He cared nothing for himself, only 
for the helpless woman and the little babe; and as 
he told me the story in a modest fashion on the 
train one day after the fire, I clasped his hand 
and said to him : " My friend, you can preach 
grand sermons, and you can say noble prayers, 
and you can do a great many grand things, as I 
know very well, but let me tell you that you never 
did a grander or diviner thing than on that day 
when for the sake of that mother and little child 
you went for that great brute, left hand first and 
then followed it with your right, and don't you 
forget it." Clear Grit, then, never cares for con- 
sequences when it's evident the thing has got to 
be done ; you can't crush it, you can't turn it, it 
goes right on to its purpose, and that purpose is 
accomplished when the man gets through. 

And now it would be very pleasant for me to go 
right on and talk about Clear Grit as other men 
have shown it in a grand or good fashion, but this 
is not my main purpose. I want to make some 
simple applications of the truth I am trying to 
tell, that will come right home to your life and 
mine, and show us how we can all know of what 
Grit we are made, by instances and evidences like 
these I want to mention. And so I will divide 
my lecture into three parts, for the sake of sim- 



14. CLEAR GRIT 

plicity, and go on to say that the first truth of 
Clear Grit, to me, lies in the power to do a good, 
honest day's work; second, in the power to make 
a good home and take care of it, and raise a good 
family of children ; and, third, the power to lose 
no time about it, but go ahead and see to these 
things while the bloom and glory and strength of 
our life beats in our hearts. 

And I put the power to do a good, honest day's 
work first, because eight and twenty years of hard 
work, first in the factory and then in the forge, as 
well as such light as comes to me as a minister, 
convinces me, beyond all question, that this power 
to do a good, honest day's work lies at the root of 
every true life. And yet it is just what great 
numbers of men try not to do, as if they felt that 
the true thing means to get the most money pos- 
sible for the least work possible, and very often 
for the poorest work, too ; and that the best suc- 
cess they can attain to in this world is that which 
comes through what we call " good luck." I think 
young men begin their life in this new world be- 
wildered by the opportunities that open before 
them to make a fortune at a stroke. There is no 
such instant need to do something solid and steady, 
the moment they are out of school or college, as 
there is in poorer countries, and so they coquette 
with the chances that seem as thick as black- 
berries to get along easily ; they will try this and 
then that, and generally fail at everything they 
do try, if this is all they want to do, and then wait 



CLEAR GRIT 15 

for something to turn up. Now, we ought never 
to forget that Mr. Micawber, after trusting to his 
luck for all those years, waiting for something to 
turn up, had to strip at last and turn up some- 
thing for himself. He failed entirely to do any* 
thing until he began to do something in dead 
earnest, and every dollar he made when he did 
begin to succeed over there in Australia was, no 
doubt, a draft honestly endorsed by his brain 
and muscle and dug out of the solid gold of his 
own manhood. So waiting for something to turn 
up is the greatest mistake a young man can make 
who wants to show his Grit. You know that, of 
all the adventurers that ever trod the Pacific slope 
waiting for something to turn up, not a man found 
the gold that was right there under his feet. It 
was found at last by a man who was doing good, 
honest work, digging a mill-race for a mill to 
grind corn. Mr. Smiles, in one of his capital 
books, tells the story of a man in the last century 
who undertook to make a steam engine. He suc- 
ceeded, so far as you could see, in making a very 
good engine indeed. The lever lifted to a charm, 
the piston answered exactly, the wheels turned 
beautifully, and nothing could be better so far. 
But when it came to be fairly tried there was one 
drawback, and it was this : " The moment you 
tackled anything to it, it stood stock-still. On 
its own hook it would work beautifully, turn its 
own wheels faultlessly, but the moment you wanted 
it to lift a pound beside, then the lever and piston 



16 CLEAR GRIT 

and wheels struck work, and, as it was made in 
an age and country in which to do nothing was 
to be counted a gentleman, the thing was called 
' Evans's Gentlemanly Engine.' " Now, who 
doesn't know men whose action resembles that gen- 
tlemanly engine? What little they do, they do 
for themselves. You can find no fault with their 
motion, and they may be polished to perfection, 
especially in those parts that are brass or steel, 
but they would not raise a blister on their hands 
to save their souls. 

Their one motto is to take care of number one, 
and in doing this they usually come to one of 
three things — either to depend on the old man, 
their father, if he has anything to spare, or on 
their friends, if they have any left, or, as I think, 
the saddest of all — go down to Washington to 
hunt for an office they know they can't fill, and 
draw money they know they don't earn, — the 
meanest thing, I think, such a man can do. 

They bury their talent in a napkin, like the 
man in the Gospels ; and I think, sometimes, that 
by the time they're through, they'll be mean 
enough and selfish enough to be ready to say, 
when they go to their account, " Lord, there's the 
talent thou gavest me, but that's my napkin ; give 
me my napkin back." 

This is the first proof a man can give that 
there's no Clear Grit in him — to do nothing in 
particular, or come as near as he can to his own 
idea of a gentleman by dodging everything that 



CLEAR GRIT 17 

is not easy and light. The question, What makes 
a gentleman? is not an easy one to answer, but be- 
tween such a man as that and a good blacksmith 
or carpenter or plowman or woodchopper, a man 
who throws all his manhood into his day's work, 
there can be no sort of comparison. 

A hard-handed mechanic is beyond all question 
the truer gentleman, as well as the better man, 
and in the good time coming everybody will say 
so that has a right to be an^^body. Honest work, 
well done, then, is the first proof I can give of 
Clear Grit. 

This does not mean, however, merely to work 
hard, because to work honestly is more essential 
than to work hard at anything. I had a shop- 
mate in the forge who was just as good a black- 
smith when he did his level best as any man I ever 
knew, but it seems to me now that he was the most 
ingenious fellow at getting up any sort of a lie in 
iron who ever stood at the anvil. Now, a man like 
this may work hard, but, on the whole, the harder 
he works, the worse it is, because he just works 
hard at lying, and now poor Jack stands to me 
for a good many working men. (Jack died in the 
workhouse.) It is no matter where they're found 
or what they do, they may not work in iron as 
Jack did, but they are forgers for all that, if they 
are only ingenious for dishonesty, and make their 
money by make-believes. 

I could show you a pair of iron gates in one of 
the great museums in London made by a black- 



18 CLEAR GRIT 

smith two hundred years ago, down in Notting- 
hamshire, for a great nobleman's park. I had 
never heard of the man until I saw the gates and 
found his name on the catalogue, and if he had 
never done that piece of work, we should never 
have heard of him again. He was only a smith, 
he did that work with his own rough hands, but he 
did it so honestly and so well, it was so beautiful 
when it was finished, that people would come from 
far and wide in England to look at those gates, 
and then they were fain to preserve them in the 
museum as one of the wonders it does your heart 
good to see and makes good the poet's line, " A 
thing of beauty is a joy forever." And so I say 
the blacksmith who works honestly and well from 
Monday morning to Saturday night, doing his 
good, honest day's work, and being a man to 
match the work he is doing, is beyond all question 
the nobler and better man than the minister who 
dawdles along through the week, doing nothing 
in particular one way or the other, and then on 
the Sunday morning preaches a poor, worthless 
sermon. I know that, because I have done both. 
I said the second proof of the truth I would 
tell is the power to' make a good home, and to 
raise, if it pleases God, a noble family of children ; 
while the good home presupposes that indispensa- 
ble preliminary to all good homes, a good wife and 
a good husband — and I say wife and husband, 
because I really believe there are numbers of men 
who marry but don't get a wife, and a good many 



CLEAR GRIT 19 

women who marry but don't get a husband, and 
perhaps never find it out until the mistake is be- 
yond all remedy, excepting that of going, let us 
say, to Dakota to get a divorce. And I think 
sometimes the way this comes about is this: That 
a great many young women, before they get mar- 
ried, are only anxious to have what they call all 
the accomplishments ; but they don't mean by this 
how to make good wholesome bread, or a bowl of 
soup, how to roast a piece of beef, how to boil a 
potato (a very fine art, indeed, you may say), how 
to darn a stocking, and make a shirt and iron 
it, and keep a home smelling as sweet as wild roses, 
and shining like a new silver dollar ; but I may 
mention among the modern accomplishments how 
to do tatting and embroidery, how to draw " won- 
derful shepherdesses with pink eyes," how to talk 
impossible French, and discourse music so difficult 
that when you hear it you remember Johnson's 
grim joke, when a friend, as they listened to some 
music, said, " That's very fine music, Doctor ; " 
and the old bear said, " I wish it was impossible." 
Now, that is what no small number call an edu- 
cation. All the accomplishments except those 
that are indispensable to a good wife the young 
woman gets, and then she gets married. And the 
young man gets an education that is just about 
as delectable to fit him for a husband. We call it 
sowing his wild oats. The worst of it I dare not 
tell. The better side of it very often is to train 
him away from all that is domestic and delicate 



20 CLEAR GRIT 

and unspeakably sacred in a good home ; to teach 
him to play billiards instead of reading books, to 
prefer cards to any other sort of picture, and 
sometimes to be more familiar with the inside of 
the hells of the city than the churches. Then he 
goes into society, scented and curled, meets the 
young woman with all the accomplishments, be- 
lieves her to be the exception to all her sex in an- 
gelic beauty and excellence, gives her what heart 
he has left, and so the match is made, and they 
are wedded wife and husband so long as they both 
shall live, if they can stand it. Now, such a mar- 
riage reminds me of a wedding we had once in 
Yorkshire, where I was raised. As the man came 
out of church with his bride on his arm he met an 
old comrade, who said : " There, lad, I wish thee 
much joy; thou's got to t'end of all thy trouble." 
Well, this was very good of the comrade, and so 
he said : " Thank thee, lad," and went on his way 
rejoicing. But in no long time he found he had 
got married without getting a wife. It was a bad 
job altogether, and going on the street about 
three months after, he met his comrade again, and 
said to him, with a very long face : " I thought 
thou told me, John, when I came out of Guiseley 
church that morning, that I had got to t'end of 
all my trouble." " Oh, yes, I did tell thee so," 
the other man replied, with a grin, " but I didn't 
tell thee which end." 

Then there's another match not quite so bad 
as this but still bad enough, and the ruin of a 



CLEAR GRIT 21 

great many homes, where the husband and wife 
are both capable, both domestic, and seem to 
have everything the heart can wish for except 
a good honest love. The man is clever, so is the 
woman ; she wants a home, he can make one ; she 
wants a husband, he wants a housekeeper; he will 
bring in the living and foot the bills, and she will 
slave and save on one gown a year and her old 
bonnet, done up nobody knows how many times, 
and hear a good deal of growling, then, about the 
extravagance of women. Now, a good home can 
no more bloom out of such a life as that than a 
damask rose can bloom on an iceberg; it's tyrant 
and slave, or else it's two slaves. It's two strings 
full of nothing but harsh discords constantly un- 
der the bow of the daily life. 

But there is a wedding that's just as good as 
gold, and sure to result in a good, true home, and 
that is when the man and woman, understanding 
what a good home means, are drawn together by 
the true Providence, which still makes all true 
matches, in spite of the maneuverings of our prej- 
udice and pride ; when they come together in a 
fair equality, not, as the poet sings, as moonlight 
and the sunlight, but as perfect music unto no- 
ble words. 

I was once at a meeting in which a very notable 
Woman's Rights advocate was speaking about the 
essential equality of the sexes in the wedded life, 
when, rather to my astonishment, she looked right 
at me and said : " Robert Collyer, I hope when thee 



m CLEAR GRIT 

marries a man and woman, thee does not ask the 
woman to say she will obey the man, without ask- 
ing the man to say he will obey the woman, so that 
it may be fair on both sides." I thought for a 
moment of telling a story that illustrates so well 
what a woman will say to get the man she has 
made up her mind to marry — the story of the 
woman who declared she would never promise to 
obey, would get around it by some means, would 
never say the word, and the minister who was to 
marry them heard all about it before he came to 
the wedding. The word came in as the service 
went on, and the woman followed the service un- 
til she came to this word, and then she was seized 
with a very bad fit of coughing. " Take your 
time," the good man said, " there is no sort of 
hurry ; we will begin again." They began again, 
but she broke down at this word " obey," and the 
cough came on worse than ever. " We will try 
once more," he said, for ministers are very pa- 
tient ; but once more the bride broke down, and 
then, I fear, he lost his temper, and said, " Madam, 
it is clear to me that you cannot go through this 
service, and so I cannot marry you," but, at this 
instant, as he was saying these words, she lifted 
up her voice and said " obey," with an emphasis 
that almost took his breath away. I thought for 
an instant of telling that story, but what I said 
was this : " Madam, I never do ask any woman to 
say she will obey the man, and let the man go free, 
because some of the best women I have ever known 



CLEAR GRIT 23 

said they would obey the man, and never did, be- 
yond what was fair and right, and I have found 
out, therefore, that this is a promise more honored, 
very often, in the breach than in the observance." 
Now, I know the common idea of the relation 
of the man and woman is this : That the man is 
the volume and the woman the supplement; but 
this, no doubt, is the truth, that the man is, let us 
say, the first volume, good enough as far as it 
goes, and rather interesting to study, but, if there 
is to be no second, a good deal more of an aggra- 
vation than if there was not any ; a story half-told 
and then broken off, as they do in the magazines, 
just where you feel you must know the sequel, or 
else it is very little use knowing what you do. The 
man is as good when he's made, if we follow the 
ancient record, as a man can be without a woman. 
But then there seems to be nothing even for the 
Creator to do but to put him to sleep until he makes 
a woman, and when he brings her to the man and 
defines their relation, you will notice they are not 
made one and that one the man, but they're one in a 
perfect oneness, as it seems, of equality, and that 
is the only way to live in a true wedded life so far. 
Let the man say " you shall," and the woman say 
" I won't," and let them keep running on that 
line, and there will be a smash as sure as fate, or, 
what is worse than any such catastrophe, imperious 
tyranny on the one side and craven fear on the 
other. But from Eastport and San Francisco 
a youth and maiden shall come with this equal rev- 



U CLEAR GRIT 

erence each for the other in their hearts. They 
shall see many youths and maidens far more beau-* 
tiful and winsome to others than they are, but 
they shall never see those they are looking for 
until they meet some day, somewhere, and all at 
once it flashes on them that they are meant for 
husband and wife. It is no matter then if the one 
is rich and the other poor, or the woman is beau- 
tiful and the man is homely, or that they have met 
by what seems to be a mere accident, or that the 
world wonders at the match. Theirs is still the 
greater wonder that there could be such a man 
and woman in this world, and then that they could 
have found each other when there were so many 
chances, as it seems to them, against it. 

I tell you love and troth like that abide where 
there is no marrying and giving in marriage, but 
where men and women are as the angels of God. 
Yet, I feel quite free to say this as no snap judg- 
ment, but as a rule we can trust, if my observa- 
tion is worth anything, the weddings that turn 
out usually the best are those in which the young 
folks know each other in a pure, sweet fashion, 
it may be for years, before they take this step. 
If they live in the country, they go to school to- 
gether, and singing-school, and apple-bees, and 
huskings. He knows all about her bread and but- 
ter and pies and doughnuts, and other things dear 
to the heart of man. I mean, of course, his stomach, 
by very much experience. And she knows about 
his faculty for holding his own and going ahead 



CLEAR GRIT S5 

on the farm or in the workshop, and what kind of 
temper he has, and how he can manage a span of 
horses in a sleigh on a frosty night and hold the 
reins with one hand. And if she is in the kitchen 
when he calls to see her she doesn't rush upstairs 
to put on a silk dress and a simper ; she comes in 
just as she is to see him, and if he gives her a kiss, 
as he has a perfect right to do, his breath doesn't 
smell of cloves. They are clean, honest, whole- 
some young folks, who know they have good rea- 
son why they should love and trust each other, 
and then when they are made one, their life blends 
sweetly together, as two streams run .together to 
make a river, and so they live on, full of content, 
to their golden wedding. I do not say one word 
to show that the man and wife will never say a 
sharp thing to each other, or get up a little breeze, 
for, if my own experience goes for anything, I 
think they are pretty sure to do that now and 
then; but then I think also that a thunderstorm 
can clear the atmosphere under the roof as well 
as it can above the roof, if it be not a cruel storm. 
So when I hear people say they have lived together 
five and twenty years and never had the least dif- 
ference, I have wondered whether they have not had 
a good deal of indifference. 

I think a pair of clams could live as quiet and 
even a life as that, but I don't want to be one of 
the clams. The truth is that the best woman who 
ever lived with a man may say things to her hus- 
band now and then she will let no other woman say 



26 CLEAR GRIT 

about him, or they will get such a piece of her 
mind as they never thought of getting, and the 
best husband may now and then make his will 
known to his wife in tones so imperious that if he 
heard another man use them to her he would lash 
out and knock him down if he was a Quaker in 
good standing, for daring to speak in that way to 
the mother of his children. 

So I said just now a love and troth like that 
abides where there is no marrying or giving in 
marriage, but where men and women are like the 
angels of God. Chance and change make no dif- 
ference, but on the golden wedding day, after 
fifty years of such a life together, the glory of the 
maiden cannot be seen by reason of the glory 
which excelleth in the good old wife of seventy. 

Then I said the next thing I consider indispen- 
sable to a good home and a true man and woman' 
hood is a fine family of children, because there is 
no question we can consider in our generation, in 
America, of a deeper moment than this of the 
generation to come. It is the gravest problem 
we can sit down and study. Figures of our births 
and deaths show us that the American who has 
been longest on the soil seems to be losing ground, 
and the newcomer from the world over is taking 
his place, and the best wisdom of the country 
makes the citizen responsible for this state of 
things. It is said there are multitudes of men 
whose fathers were willing to die for their 
country in the great old time we remember who are 



CLEAR GRIT 27 

not willing to live for it now, and the daughters 
of good women, who could give their husbands 
and sweethearts, and work their own fingers to the 
bone to defend the land then, who are not willing 
now to give sons and daughters to people it. 
Now, one of the things I recollect with most pride 
about my great old mother country was her homes 
full of children. Everybody, as it seems to me, 
had plenty of children. Six or eight was a good 
family, ten to fifteen was a large family, and if 
there was not overmuch to give them, they made 
the best of what they had, and said God would 
send the meat if he sent the mouths ; and then, if 
it came very hard to find meat for so many mouths, 
my own experience leads me to the conclusion that 
they did as a man did on Nantucket I heard of 
one summer. He raised a mighty brood of chil- 
dren, lads and lasses, on a rather small place, and 
when someone said to him, " How in the world do 
you manage to feed so many children on that small 
farm ? " " Oh, it is no trouble at all," he answered ; 
" I find out what they don't like, and give them 
plenty of that, so we get along very well." The 
consequence of this great income of children in the 
motherland is this, that the common people, the 
famines at the foundation of the English life, never 
die out. They hold their own through all the gen- 
erations, they fill the land full, and send out 
great swarms for the new hives the Divine 
Husbandman has provided here, and out in Aus- 
tralia, and over in Africa and India, and wherever 



^8 CLEAR GRIT 

besides they are needed. When the son of Wil- 
liam the Conqueror was killed by a glancing arrow 
in the New Forest, more than seven hundred years 
ago, a man named Purkiss, as the story runs, 
found the body of the king as he went through the 
forest with a load of charcoal, and carried it to 
Winchester on his cart for burial. I don't know 
how it may be now, but fifty years ago, if you had 
gone to that new forest in Hampshire, the odds 
are that you might meet a man named Purkiss, go- 
ing down that same road with a load of charcoal. 
His family outlived the oaks that were acorns 
when William Rufus fell, for aught I know, on the 
same spot, and he will be there, going for a load of 
charcoal, when Macaulay's traveler comes from 
New Zealand to stand on a broken arch of Lon- 
don Bridge and sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. 

In what we call the good old times — say three 
hundred years ago — a family lived on the border 
between England and Scotland, with one daughter 
of a marvelous homeliness. Her name was Meg. 
She was a capital girl, as homely girls generally 
are. She knew she had no beauty, so she made 
sure of quality and faculty. But the Scotch say 
that " while beauty may not make the best kail, 
it looks best by the side of the kail pot." So Meg 
had no oflf'er of a husband, and was likely to die 
in what we call " single blessedness." Everybody 
on the border in those days used to steal, and 
their best " holt," as we say, was cattle. If they 
wanted meat and had no money, they would go out 



CLEAR GRIT 29 

and steal as many beef-cattle as they could lay 
their hands on from somebody on the other side of 
the border. Well, they generally had no money, 
and they were always wanting beef, and they 
could always be hung for stealing by the man 
they stole from if he could catch them, and so they 
had what an Irishman would call a fine time en- 
tirely. 

One day a young chief, wanting some beef 
as usual, went out with part of his clan, came 
upon a splendid herd on the lands of Meg's father, 
and went to work to drive them across to his own. 
But the old fellow was on the lookout, mustered 
his clan, bore down on the marauders, beat them, 
took the young chief prisoner, and then went home 
to his Peel very much delighted. Meg's mother, 
of course, wanted to know all about it, and then 
she said, " Noo, laird, what are you gaun to do 
with the prisoner? " " I am gaun to hang him," 
the old man thundered, " just as soon as I have had 
my dinner." " But I think ye're no' wise to do 
that," she said. " He has got a braw place, ye 
ken, over the border, and he is a braw fellow. 
Now, I'll tell ye what I would do. I would give 
him his chance to be hung or marry o'or Meg." 
It struck the old man as a good idea, and so he 
went presently down into the dungeon, told the 
young fellow to get ready to be hung in thirty 
minutes, but then got round to the other alterna- 
tive, and offered to spare his life if he would 
marry Meg, and give him the beef into the bar- 



so CLEAR GRIT 

gain. He had heard something about Meg's won- 
derful want of beauty, and so, with a fine Scotch 
prudence, he said : " Ye will let me see her, laird, 
before I mak' up my mind, because maybe I would 
rather be hung." " Aye, mon, that's fair," the 
old chief answered, and went in to bid the mother 
get Meg ready for the interview. The mother 
did her best, you may be sure, to make Meg look 
winsome, but when the poor fellow saw his uninten- 
tional intended he turned round to the chief and 
said: "Laird, if ye have nae objection, I think 
I would rather be hung." " And sae ye shall, me 
lad, and welcome," the old chief replied, in a rage. 
So they led him out, got the rope around his neck, 
and then the young man changed his mind, and 
shouted : " Laird, I'll tak' her." So he was 
marched back into the Peel, married before he had 
time to change his mind, if that was possible, and 
the tradition is that there never was a happier 
pair in Scotland, and never a better wife in the 
world than Meg. 

But I have told the story because it touches 
this point, of the way they hold their own over 
there when there are great families of children. 
They tell me that the family flourishes famously 
still; no sign of dying out or being lost about it. 
Meg's main feature was a very large mouth, and 
now in the direct line in almost every generation 
the neighbors and friends are delighted, as they 
say, to get Meg back. " Here's Meg again," 
they cry when a child is born with that wonderful 



CLEAR GRIT 31 

mouth. Sir Walter Scott was one of the descend- 
ants of the family. He had Meg's mouth, in a 
measure, and was very proud of it when he would 
tell the story. 

A good home and a good family of children — 
that is the great hope of your life and mine, and 
the life of our Republic. So I tell you that when 
the father was willing to die for his country in the 
great old time, and the son is not willing to live for 
it now in raising up, please God, a noble line of 
sons and daughters, there is something radically 
wrong in that home. I need not tell you what a 
difficulty I encounter in touching this matter in 
any way, and I can hardly tell you how impossible 
I have found it to put my meaning into words. 
But I speak for this which should give every man 
courage, when I say whatever the reason may be, 
if there be one, for keeping the home empty or 
only half full, I think it is the most fatal blow 
any man can strike, either at his own soul or the 
soul of his country. For it is not merely what 
we may take from the measure of life, but what 
we may take from its hope and joy. What would 
have been the result, think you, if something like 
this had been hidden away in a secret chamber in 
Stratford-on-Avon, or in the auld clay biggen, 
where Robert Burns was born, or in a farmhouse 
on the Rappahannock, where George Washington 
was born, or in a poor cabin in Kentucky, where 
a child was born and baptized by the name of 
Abraham Lincoln, or in many homes beside that 



S2 CLEAR GRIT 

were out of sight then, as ours are now ; but now 
they are lifted and set on the shining summits of 
the world. I think sometimes I could wish no 
worse hell for my worst enemy, if I ever take to 
bad wishing, than that one should haunt him in 
the world to come, wherever he goes, and say, " I 
might have come into the great Commonwealth of 
America and made it rich beyond all computation 
by my gift from on High ; but I had to come 
through your home, if I came at all, and you were 
not man enough, or woman enough, to receive me. 
You broke down the frail footway by which I was 
trying to cross over into the life down there, and 
then you thought you had circumvented Provi- 
dence, and done a clever thing." 

I said the third condition of Clear Grit is this: 
that a man shall make sure, as soon as he can, all 
this is true as Gospel, and order his life accord- 
ingly. Because it is a great mistake in a young 
man to think that he can wait as long as he will be- 
fore he begins to gather these conditions about him. 
I have tried to describe a true wife, a good home, 
and such a family as he can find in his heart ; and, 
then, when he has made his fortune and can keep 
a wife and family in a certain social standing, 
with all the luxuries he wants, he thinks he has 
done his whole duty. If you ask him why he does 
this, he will tell you he cannot do any better; he 
cannot ask a woman to marry him out of a mansion 
and go to live in what he would call a cabin. The 
woman he wants could not live in a cabin if she 



CLEAR GRIT 33 

would, and would not if she could. " She is not 
fit to be a poor man's wife," he says, and so he 
cannot ask her to marry him until he has got a 
good income. Now, by the time a man has cut 
his wisdom teeth, he begins to find out some secrets 
on that question, I would like to mention. First 
of all, he finds out that the woman who is not fit 
to be a poor man's wife, as a general rule, is not fit 
to be any man's wife, especially in a land and life 
where no man knows how soon he may be poor — 
and most men of this sort are poor two or three 
times in the course of their lifetime. Suppose, 
again, that the woman is fit to be a poor man's 
wife, and, therefore, all the fitter to be a rich man's 
wife, and he dare not ask her to leave her father's 
mansion and live with him in a poor man's home, 
but " Lets I dare not wait upon I would " until 
she's thirty or more and he is thirty-five to forty, 
and then proposes and starts oiF, as he imagines, 
all right at last. 

One of the first things she tells him, most prob- 
ably, is this: that she would have jumped at him 
ten years ago if he had only said so; she wanted 
him to say so, and was heavy of heart because he 
did not see as she did, how important it was that 
they should not put off the time too long, and 
would have infinitely preferred a four-room cot- 
tage and a dinner of herbs, if he was there to share 
it, to all the blessings his money can bring when 
the bloom of their youth is over. So one of the 
greatest mistakes a young man can make is to 



34 CLEAR GRIT 

" shunt over," shall I say, on a sidetrack, and 
wait ten or fifteen years for a train of circum- 
stances that will enable him to get married and 
have a home. Very sad altogether is the outlook 
of the man who hears the voice say to him in his 
Eden when he is, let us say, twenty-five, " Here is 
the woman I have made for thee," and answers, 
" I cannot take her yet for ten or fifteen years to 
come." It must be a very sacred reason that can 
make a man do this, because while he is saving 
money, he is wasting life — his own life and an- 
other — and all that is hidden in the secret places 
of life and time. And I speak by the Book when I 
say this, in the most literal sense. In the best 
statistical tables I could find when I was thinking 
of these questions, those of Scotland, made out by 
Dr. Starke, the register-general of that time, it 
was shown that from the age of twenty to twenty- 
five twice as many bachelors die as married men. 
I was appalled when I read this, at the risk I had 
run in staying single until I was almost twenty- 
five, and thought if I had to do it over again I 
would take my chance of living. From twenty-five 
to thirty, he says, of every thousand men that die 
the proportion is eight married, fourteen single. 
From thirty to thirty-five, eight married, fifteen 
single ; and so on to eighty and eighty-five, when 
you can give it up as a bad job. But the whole 
average gives the married man nineteen years more 
of life than the single man. So you see we still 
raise martyrs — only they die now, not for faith. 



CLEAIl GRIT 35 

but for fear. The average for single women is a 
little better, and so it ought to be, because they 
are not so much to blame as the men. But the 
whole tale of a single life, from the time when the 
call comes to the man and maiden to plight their 
troth and make their home, is a tale of heavy risks, 
against which I know of no insurance but the min- 
ister's wedding fee. 

And what young men and women lose beside in 
saying " It shall not be spring until — let us say 
— the end of June," I can only leave to their good 
sense and yours. About all the birds that sing in 
the woods begin to be a little silent by the end of 
June, and all the spring flowers are dead then, and 
the best of the spring is over and gone for the 
year. So the weddings that are almost as sad as 
funerals to me, sometimes, are those that might 
have come, and should have come, in the May days 
of our life. And so, if any young man who hears 
me has been waiting like that, and will go right 
away and pop the question before Sunday, the 
money he paid for his ticket tO' this lecture will be 
one of the best investments he ever made in his 
Hfe. 

One thing more will complete this question of 
Clear Grit, so far as I propose to follow it ; and 
that is, when a man has got things about as I have 
tried to describe them, he shall feel sure he's one 
of the happiest men anywhere on the planet, and 
settle down to live his life to this good purpose. 



36 CLEAR GRIT 

It is the curse, and the blessing also, of our Ameri- 
can life that we are never quite content. We all 
expect to go somewhere before we die, or do some- 
thing that will give us a far better time than we 
can have now. We are going to have a good time 
in the future ; just let us make our fortune and get 
everything as we want it, and be able to do as we 
wish, and then we say we are going to be as happy 
as the day is long. 

Well, I had an old neighbor once, a blacksmith, 
who got that notion into his head. He said, 
" When I get money enough to retire, me and my 
wife are going to have a real good time." 

By and by he had got all the money he wanted, 
sold out his forge, and began, as he thought, with 
his wife, to have a good time. He slept in the 
morning until he couldn't sleep another wink to 
save him. Then he began to get up at the old 
hour by the clock. He went round to see every- 
body and everything he could think of, read his 
paper all through, pottered in his garden until he 
got a crick in his back and a pain in his knees, 
and then he went to the man that had bought him 
out and said : " Any time when you want some- 
body to come in and lend a hand, you just ask me, 
and I won't charge you nothing." 

I knew an old gentleman and lady who came 
from England a great many years ago and went 
to work to make a fortune, but always said that 
just as soon as they had made their fortune they 
would go back home. They could never be happy 



CLEAR GRIT 37 

in this country; dear old England was the place 
for them ; if they could once get back to that 
blessed old home, there wouldn't be a wish left in 
their hearts to be satisfied. In about twenty years 
they found they were independent, sold out their 
business, and prepared to go back to England and 
the felicity of which they had been dreaming so 
long. 

Their old home was in Cheshire, so their port 
was Liverpool. They thought they would stay a 
few days in Liverpool to get a foretaste of the joy 
before they went forward to Cheshire ; and so they 
went about Liverpool to enjoy themselves with all 
their might. At the end of three days, the old 
man said : " Wife, I don't think Liverpool is 
exactly what we expected, is it.? " " Husband," 
the old wife said, " I don't think England is what 
we expected, either." And then he said again: 
" If things are no better when we get to the old 
place in Cheshire, I shall vote for going back to 
Milwaukee." " Oh, husband," she said, " I am 
ready to go back this moment. Let's go home" 
They called it home at last over here. And he 
answered : " Well, I don't know but you're right ; 
but as we have come to try Cheshire and the old 
place, we had better carry out the programme." 
And so they did. They went back, stayed there 
six weeks, took their passage on a steamer at the 
end of that time, made a bee-line for Milwaukee, 
where he went again into business. They have 
been dead now some years, but when I knew them 



38 CLEAR GRIT 

they were just as happy as the day was long. 
They had got home. 

The bane of our Hfe is our discontent. We 
say we will work so long, and then we will begin 
to enjoy ourselves; but we find it is very much 
as Thackeray said : " When I was a boy," he 
said, " I wanted some taffy. It was a shilling. 
I hadn't a shilling. And then, when I was a man, 
I had a shilling, but I didn't want any taffy." I 
say not one syllable against that splendid discon- 
tent that all the time makes a man strike for 
something better, while he still holds on to what he 
has got already. I like this idea: that every boy 
born in America of the good American blood 
dreams some time of being President of the Repub- 
lic. They say in Scotland that if you aim at a gown 
of gold you are pretty sure to get a sleeve: and I 
say no man has any right to be content not to be 
his best or do his best, and not do better tomorrow 
than he is doing to-day. But the truth I am after 
is that all this will come by keeping close to this 
manful and true life; and while we work steadily 
along to whatever fortune waits for us in the 
future, about the best thing we can do is to feel 
sure that this work we are doing, and the wife and 
the home and the children, these are the choicest 
earthward blessings Heaven has to give. It is our 
birthright to get the good of life as we go along, 
in these things that to a true man and woman are 
like the rain and sunshine to an apple tree. But 
when we will not believe this, and will still dream 



CLEAR GRIT 39 

that the best of our life is to come when we have 
made our fortune and exhaust the springs of Hfe 
in making the fortune, then, you see, we sell our 
birthright, like Esau in the old time, for a mess of 
pottage: but we do not get even the satisfaction 
Esau got out of his bargain, because the mess of 
pottage is apt to give us the dyspepsia; and so 
we lose the good of birthright and pottage to- 
gether. 



CATHEDRALS 

The most wonderful and beautiful things in 
England to me are her Cathedrals, and I think they 
are the most wonderful and beautiful things to the 
majority of Englishmen who never leave home. 
When I was six years old I can remember what a 
sorrow came flying over our little country place 
at the news that the great Cathedral in York had 
been set on fire by a fanatic who thought he was 
obeying a voice from Heaven, hid himself in service 
time, piled up books and cushions after the sex- 
tons had gone out, set them on fire and then climbed 
out at a window by one of the bell ropes. 

The fire spread in the vast spaces for many 
hours but the city went to sleep without a suspicion 
of the destruction which was gathering about the 
fairest jewel in the north, the pride of the great 
county, and the most perfect Gothic church in the 
world, until, at two o'clock in the morning, a man 
going through the church-yard fell on the frozen 
pavement, and, as he rose to his feet saw the glare 
in one of the windows, sounded the alarm, and then, 
from towns thirty and forty miles away, the engines 
went galloping toward the fire at the summons of 
the citizens, and all that human power could do to 
save the precious pile was done, but not before a 

40 



CATHEDRALS 4.1 

great part of the beauty was turned to ashes, the 
wonderful carving in stone and wood, the marvelous 
windows that flashed in your eyes as you stood on 
the hills forty miles away in the setting sun, and 
the ancient tombs of brass and marble running back 
into the dim centuries, — all went down together 
in the fire. 

I think our people felt the calamity as if it had 
struck their own homes. I can just see them, 
through my child eyes, talking about it as they 
met in the lanes and at the fireside, the cloud on 
their faces, the sadness in their voices, and the 
wonder what would be done now that the glory had 
gone out, while it seemed as if there was a flash out 
of the awful deeps no man may fathom, when they 
found on the very next Sunday that the Lesson 
read on that day ever since the times of Elizabeth 
held the words " Our holy and beautiful house 
where our fathers praised Thee is burnt with fire, 
and all our pleasant things are laid waste." 

It was not really a place of worship so much as 
a place to be worshiped ; not one in a thousand had 
ever stayed there through a sei^ice, and if they had 
it would hardly have been worth their while except 
as they might be touched by the matchless music 
and the singing. 

But the Yorkshire folk like their own music best, 
as a rule, and do not take kindly to any other. They 
want to take part in it, to make a mighty noise 
unto God, and certainly they succeed. What they 
loved there was just the great, grand pile that had 



m CLEAR GRIT 

stood as it was for five hundred years, and before 
that for perhaps ten hundred more, falling and 
rising with the chance and change of time. They 
had all been there once and the visit was a white 
day in their lives. It had been like the visit of the 
disciples to the Mount of Transfiguration, a vision 
of glory never to be forgotten. And so it was felt 
to be a common calamity ! 

Before I was able to go there and see it for my- 
self, some fifteen years after, it had been restored 
to something like its original beauty, and I have 
gone there from this country twice to see the brave 
sight again, to see others, also, each wonderful in 
its way, in other parts of England, and that espe- 
cially, I remember with the greatest delight, at 
Durham — a great, grand pile of Norman work 
of which Dr. Johnson said, " It looks as if it had 
grown out of the rock on which it is founded and 
would stand as long as the rock will hold it ; " 
where Cuthbert rests under the great marble slab 
worn hollow by the knees of the worshipers who 
came and went for perhaps 600 years before the 
Reformation; where Bede rests, that noble spirit, 
who gave us the first Saxon translation of the 
Gospels, and, finding he was passing away as the 
last chapter drew to a close bade the scribe hasten 
his hand that the work might be done, and then 
breathed his last. 

I want to speak to you now and then this winter 
about some of these cathedrals and the memories 
they hold, and shall begin this evening by touching 



CATHEDRALS 45 

my dream of their beauty as it stays with me, and 
some of its lessons, reserving special studies, like 
that you may remember of Westminster, for other 
chances; and to begin by saying that the first 
thing these English cathedrals do is to upset en- 
tirely and destroy that idea we all harbor some- 
where within us, that we have gone ahead, in every- 
thing, of what we call the Dark Ages, though you 
shall hear old people say that times are all the 
time growing worse, but they mean by this that the 
times were better when they were young, or, at 
most, a hundred years ago, or at the farthest, in 
the days of Good Queen Bess, as they call her over 
there without any reason in the world. The good 
times, I think, to all our minds, find their uttermost 
edge about then; but before then you begin to 
touch the Dark Ages. Now, all these cathedrals, 
except St. Paul's in London, grew to this marvelous 
beauty and completeness some hundreds of years 
before Elizabeth. They range through a period 
of perhaps 200 years, but the most and the best 
of them were built in the Thirteenth Century, — 
that is, from five to seven hundred years ago, — and 
yet they are so wonderful in their design, so grand 
in their proportions, and so perfect in all the de- 
tails of their finish, that no man in England, or 
even in America, ever thinks of surpassing them 
in any way. 

The best architects, when they want to build a 
noble church, merely adopt the ideas of these old 
forgotten builders and, as a rule, manage to spoil 



44 CLEAR GRIT 

them before they get through, while as for copying 
their vast and precious beauty and finish, it is a 
thing never thought of. 

After this fire I mentioned in the Minster at 
York, the workmen went up among the dim vaults 
of oak and stone that, from their great height, had 
only appeared for centuries, to the people below, 
as it were " through a glass darkly," and never 
could appear anything else. But they were struck 
with wonder to find up there carving as perfect, to 
the last detail, as that on the stalls and altars. It 
made no difference to these reverent men in the old 
days that other men would never see what they had 
done ; they were not building for men, but for God, 
and felt it would not do to shuffle mean work away 
among the rafters and put the beauty and excel- 
lence where everybody could see it. In the old 
days before them men caught out of Heaven the 
idea that the Almighty must not be put off with 
an imperfect offering, — it must be spotless and 
speckless, and so they wrought to that idea in 
these temples built to His Name. Indeed in this 
same Church at York they showed me, the last time 
I was there, some mason work discovered a few 
years before by an accident, a part of the old 
Church built, perhaps, 1200 years ago and hidden 
away when the great Gothic pile was reared after 
the Norman Conquest. It was as sharp and clear 
and beautifully joined as if it had been done yes- 
terday by the best masons on the earth ; great mas- 
sive stones fitted to their places with the finest 



CATHEDRALS 45 

cement, of which not an ounce went to hide bad 
work. All there was had been laid there simply 
for perfection of the perfect stone, and not a stone 
had shifted a line out of its place or sunk from its 
true level in all these ages. And so it is everywhere 
with these Churches, allowing for the inevitable 
wear and tear of time and the difficulty the slender 
and delicate work blossoming out of the stone finds 
in withstanding the elements. For these Gothic 
Cathedrals are, of all things that were ever done in 
stone and wood, the most difficult to preserve, and 
at the same time give that lightness of design 
which is their rare perfection, and the builders 
knew it. But then it was to them as it is to us 
now, the most beautiful way to build, and so they 
neither spared their money nor hedged against 
spending more the moment there was any needed. 
They believed that the most sacred outward thing 
they could do was to build a grand temple to the 
Lord — whether they were right or wrong I shall 
not say in this connection. They believed, also, 
that the people who loved God and loved their 
Church would always be ready to keep it up to the 
high standard of perfection they had touched in 
its completion, and so they died with its glory in 
their eyes. 

But in these Cathedrals you have to wonder not 
alone at the perfection of beauty, but at its diver- 
sity, — no two of them are alike or at all alike. In 
this new land and life of ours you may travel a 
thousand miles and never know where you are by 



46 CLEAR GRIT 

the churches, ex^cept in Montreal, where the great 
Cathedral of Notre Dame has a certain character 
we find nowhere else on the continent ; but in that 
little England you cannot mistake your locality — 
if you catch sight of a Cathedral. " Ah ! " you 
say, " this is Salisbury," as you see one tall spire 
rising from the downs and then the marvelous west 
front with its three great lancet windows and in- 
numerable niches once filled with statues of the 
saints and heroes of the old time. Then two great 
square towers rise out of a gray old city and you 
say " Canterbury," and think that just here the 
glad tidings were first heard that turned pagan 
England into Christian England after a long fight. 
You ride over a great plain, and gradually, out of 
the haze, rise three great towers, two just alike 
and one rising above them, massive, square, and 
almost bare of ornament, and you say again : 
" This is York," before you see the ancient walls 
that compass the town or the west front of the 
Church with the statues of Walter Gray, who made 
it, and Vavasour of Haslewood, who gave the 
stone; wonderful old York, where they used to 
decide, now and then, the fortunes of the Roman 
Empire, and, when the Christian Faith got the 
mastery, built this Church on the site of a heathen 
temple. And this with one low square tower and 
a round Saxon doorway all abloom with carving, — 
" What is this ? " — this is Rochester, dear to the 
heart of Charles Dickens, the scene of the work 
broken off at his death, " The Mystery of Edwin 



CATHEDRALS 47 

Drood." Dickens never tired of wandering about 
this old place, in moonlight and sunlight, and 
watching for the glory, 

" When buttress and buttress, alternately, 
Seem framed of ebon and ivory." 

And these twin tovrers set on a hill with a low 
green country all about, and red-tiled houses 
clustering about the base of the vast Norman 
pile, — that is London. And farther on, among 
the marshes, this one great square tower with 
a low tower clean at the other end, " What is 
this ? " — this is Ely ; you cannot mistake it, there 
is not another Cathedral like it in the kingdom. 
And down toward the sea this spire of an infinite 
slender beauty, rising out of another old city, — 
this is Norwich. And this massive tower, low and 
square, with carving all over it, this is Exeter. 
And these three slender spires shooting up into the 
blue sky, — this is Lichfield ; you would know Lich- 
field out of a thousand. And this vast, simple 
pile, Norman you know as you look at it, standing 
high out of the smoke of the forges that have 
turned the grass and trees black for scores of 
miles except just there, " Why ! this is Durham ! " 
where the ancestors of Washington went on holy- 
days before America was more than a dream. 

And so you may go in any direction, and you 
can never mistake your place if you can see the 
Cathedral; it stamps a character on the whole 
region, and when you say York, or Canterbury, or 



48 CLEAR GRIT 

Durham, or Lincoln, those towers and spires and 
wonderful variations of grandeur and beauty take 
the same place in your thought they take in the 
picture, — they are the one peerless presence. It 
is as if in a great crowd one should cry, " Here is 
the king," and then you saw one towering over all 
the rest and had no e3^es to see the rest for his 
stately beauty and royalty. 

Now how did these things get themselves built? 
We have, no doubt, to make allowance for ec- 
clesiastical pride and secular superstition, and for 
that spirit of competition which made one city 
vie with another for the finest structure that could 
be had for love or money ; but these are all minor 
reasons, while the great reason lay in that devout 
longing of the people to give their best and their 
fairest to God. 

Now I am by no means prepared to say, with 
some men, that this was all nonsense and worse 
than that. There is a bad side to it, and in the 
course of time it came to be so very bad that the 
honest heart of England and Germany had to 
handle it without mercy, to turn the old worship 
out of doors and introduce something cleaner and 
more reasonable. That was the bad side. But 
the good side was this : — these people made a sacri- 
fice for something higher, as they believed, and 
more sacred than their own comfort or luxury, 
and it was not eaten up by a pack of lazy beggars ; 
it grew into all this beauty and stateliness and 
became a world's wonder and a kingdom's worship. 



CATHEDRALS 4^ 

The days for such buildings are probably over, 
but in that day the people gave for the highest and 
most sacred purpose they could conceive of, for 
something that had Heaven in it, and so it was a 
noble and sacred thing to do and, no doubt, 
brought its blessing to the doer as certainly as it 
has bequeathed its beauty to these later times, and 
so I say anything that will take a man out of him- 
self and will lift him for a moment into a higher 
life than grubbing for money to spend on himself 
or leave to his children to their hurt is a blessing. 

When we do a grand thing now it is for a uni- 
versity or a library. These are the cathedrals of 
our new day ; our churches are of a lesser pattern 
and in our Protestant worship it must be so. Yet 
churches are now, as ever, indispensable things, 
and when it is possible they should always be beau- 
tiful and noble and paid for as these cathedrals 
were by the whole people, the rich casting in their 
treasure and the poor their mite, for no church 
and no service can be really worth much to any 
man who will not do his share for its building and 
maintenance. Deadheads in a church mean dead 
hearts too. 

Then there is another thing I like to think of in 
connection with these stately and enduring piles. 
As the people who said, " Let us huild them," had 
a noble idea about what they wanted to do, so had 
the men who did the work. 

Those were days when work was in itself inti- 
mately blended with what religious life people had 



50 CLEAR GRIT 

to their name. The youth was not left to run 
wild with no handicraft to carve out a living withal 
when manhood came, because the trades-unions were 
afraid of being swamped, nor was a bad workman 
deemed equal to a good one if he Avas backed by 
such a union. You could not get an inkling of 
some craft and then say, " I can do that as well as 
another man," and so go to building or plumbing 
or carving on your own word. You must serve 
seven years, from 14 to 21 under one master. 
Then you must take your kit and wander over 
England as a journey man, for that is what the 
term means, and see what they were doing far and 
wide. This was your pilgrimage and these were 
your shrines. Then you must turn out your day's 
work and let your fellows judge of its excellence, 
and then you were ready, — but not until then, — 
to go wherever you would as a free and true work- 
man. 

So these grand cathedrals rose, one by one, out 
of the fervent heart of the time and by the well 
taught head and hand. So when they touched a 
stone it blossomed into beauty, and where they laid 
it, there it stayed ; they never made a false line and 
never carved an ugly thing except by pure inten- 
tion. So that vast treasure of beauty came, and 
of variety which was never made matter for mere 
imitation, but every city held its own peerless 
treasure, v/hich the wasting and wantonness of 
three hundred years could not deform or defile. 
They laid the most precious dust there of their 



CATHEDRALS 51 

dead. The cathedral was the shrine of a county, 
the last long home of saints and heroes, and monu- 
ments were built to their memory and windows 
flashed purple and crimson and golden glories on 
their graves. 

I have said I am not sure it would be best to 
build such places again, if that were possible. 
They belonged to a time that has passed away, and 
beautiful as these shrines are that survive we must 
still remember a few things which may close my 
dream of cathedrals. 

I. God is not to be worshiped as though he 
needed these things at all ; what is required of thee, 
O man, but " to do justly, to love mercy, and to 
walk humbly with thy God." It is not on Zion or 
on Gerizim, but in the spirit and in truth we lift 
our hearts to Heaven, and such places do not 
greatly help us. They were built, indeed, for an- 
other purpose, I fear, to entrance the eyes rather 
than to touch the heart and make noble and beauti- 
ful the life. 

II. Man is not to worship as though he needed 
them; the more home-like a church can be made 
in all ways, the nearer it is to the heart of all wor- 
ship. I mind a simple log church far away in the 
West, which seemed to me one summer's day nearer 
Heaven than Cologne or York. The windows were 
thrown open to the vast green lands dotted at wide 
distances with little homes. The people came rid- 
ing over the lands in rude wagons, men and women 
and troops of children, homely replicas of the 



52 CLEAR GRIT 

angels in old pictures. It was too warm a day 
for the men to wear their coats and so they left 
them outside, and I am not sure that any woman 
wore what j^ou would call a bonnet. They sat 
down with the children about them in a very pleas- 
ant, homely way, and I often had to wait in my 
sermon for the children to hush, and look as if I 
enjoyed it very much. But it was all so home- 
like and they were so hearty and sincere and that 
log church was so sweet and sound a leaven for a 
whole county, slaying the grossness of the old evil 
times, rooting out the drinking dens at the corners, 
drawing the folk together in this friendly way to 
bend their faces before the Most High, catch new 
thoughts of our human brotherhood and find their 
way from that to the Divine, teach the children a 
few simple and sweet truths in the little Sunday 
school and send them home with a good sound book 
in their hands to where books were hardly known, 
that this stays with me still as the dream of a better 
cathedral than the most splendid fanes I have ever 
seen, when you get at the real heart of the ques- 
tion. 

III. In the very bloom and glory of that century 
when these cathedrals touched the summit of their 
splendor, the Black Death swept over England so 
fearfully and fatally that the living were hardly 
enough to bury the dead. It is surmised that 
two-thirds of the entire population died of that 
Black Death. " How did this befall us.? " I will 
tell you. We lived in base, mean, and filthy homes, 



CATHEDRALS 53 

dark, close, and ugly as sin, and the poor lived on 
mean and base food and not enough of that. 
These grand foundations were like the wens that 
draw all the life to themselves and leave the man 
to die ; the hard-working man had ultimately to 
pay for them and for the hordes and herds of men 
that lived on and in them. It was very much like 
that old print you may have seen, — the King with 
his crown says, " I govern all," the Soldier with 
his sword says, " I fight for all," the Lawyer in his 
gown says, " I plead for all," and the poor man 
w^ith his spade says " I pay for all." 

So my dream of cathedrals for our new and 
better day turns away from these, beautiful as 
they are, to foundations where we can learn how 
to live, to help each other in noble ways to a nobler 
life, to take no striving out of any man but to 
teach him how to strive to the best purpose, so 
that his life shall be well worth living. 

We are beginning to think of these things, — 
they are great things and good. My dream of a 
cathedral for the future and for this new good 
world is grand clusters of homes, full of sweetness 
and light, noble and beautiful in their way as these 
old fanes are, where we can live together and wor- 
ship together, maintaining the sanctity of the 
family and yet maintaining the brotherhood. " A 
dream," you say ; " well," I answer, " it will come 
true because it is the next great thing to build in 
our building." 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 

There is one church in England we are sure to 
visit who go there if we visit no other, and that is 
Westminster Abbey. The real mother church of 
the mother land, the great and beautiful shrine 
where her noblest dust is treasured and the monu- 
ments of her mighty dead, the place where the 
American heart is touched as I think it can be 
touched nowhere else within those four seas ! Be- 
cause this is our dust also down in the vaults and 
the finest of those monuments are ours by kinship 
of blood, and so it is as if we stood among the tra- 
ditions of some grand ancestral home where the 
dead are more to us for the moment than the liv- 
ing. They belong to the race from which we 
sprang and make close and true connection with 
its life, while no doubt it was this feeling which 
prompted Irving to write one of the finest chap- 
ters about Westminster Abbey to be found in 
books. 

I have thought also that to the most of those 
who go there from this side of the water the curi- 
ous and touching story which lies far back and 
within what they see with their eyes is still in the 
same sense a blank, — something like those old 
parchments in which when you remove what meets 

54 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 55 

the eye you find far older and more enduring rec- 
ords that by reason of their very age come home 
to you Kke a new revelation. So I want to help 
those who may go there to catch some crumb of 
the curious interest in what they will see as they 
stand within those walls, to remind some others 
of what they have seen and to what may still be 
the heavy majority, to those will never go there, 
recite something of the story of the foundation 
and fortunes of the venerable pile, so that West- 
minster Abbey may stand in its true light as a 
type of the far reaching and enduring life of 
England, a life mingled forever of good and evil, 
I know, but still with a stanch and serious pur- 
pose, as I believe, in the heart of it all, to get the 
evil under in the end and to glorify the good. 

Dean Stanley questions the truth of the eva- 
nescence of names written in water and thinks 
nothing is apt to be so abiding as such a name, 
and I think he is right. In Bede, the first English 
historian, who died 1163 years ago, mention is 
made of a well, and I was looking down into the 
cool deeps of that well a few years since. The 
whole place has been burnt over — no man knows 
how often — but the well still bubbled up fresh 
and clear all the same and said you must build 
your citadel about me or you can have no abiding 
city — and so a well 300 miles away from this I 
saw at Carlisle was the nursing mother of West- 
minster Abbey. There was once a little island 
where the Abbey stands now, made by the great 



56 CLEAR GRIT 

river on one side and on the other by some streams 
that are now lost in underground London. It 
was a haunt of wild things and was more than 
suspected of harboring demons, — loco terribilis — 
the old Saxon chronicle calls it, — and here about 
the year 600 a few brave men went to see what 
could be done to bring the island within the clasp 
of such civility as was possible in those rude and 
rough days. They struck a well in the very 
heart of the wilderness and this was the pivot on 
which all things turned. They also got a church 
going about 616 and then forever after psalms 
were sung and prayers lifted from the margin of 
that sweet old well. And then in time there came 
another sacred touch to the place. One man's 
life was so pure and good that when he died they 
made him a saint and buried him within the church, 
grouped their homes about it, and so it was very 
much like our old nests in New England to which 
our hearts are still bound by the old well, the 
meeting house and the graves of those who are to 
you as the saints. It is all dim enough through 
more than four centuries ; still these sweet home 
touches never quite fade out, the water bubbles, 
the dust of the good saint sleeps close by and the 
terrible place grows into a garden of God within 
sight of London, while the generations live and die 
and are forgotten of men forever. 

But the times we are looking at could not rest 
content with such sacredness as this, because men 
were watching then as they are watching forever 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 5*7 

for the heavens to open, and so this wonderful 
thing came as they believed of their watching. It 
was in that year, 616, and on a Sunday night, that 
Edric, a fisherman, went to fish in the river Thames, 
and was casting his nets into the stream, when he 
saw a light on the shore about where the Bishop's 
palace stands now in Lambeth. He crossed over 
to see what this meant, and found an old man 
who begged to be ferried over to the little wooden 
church which was to be dedicated the next day. 
So Edric gave him a lift and then went back to 
his work and, as he could tell you to his dying 
day, he saw the heavens grow bright and the 
angels came sweeping down through the deep blue 
vault, caught the smell of incense and heard sweet 
singing and watched and waited, but caught no 
fish. Then the old man came back again along 
toward morning, and Edric pulled in to ferry him 
ashore, and then the stranger said, " Now I will 
tell you who I am. I am St. Peter who holds the 
keys, and when the Bishop comes over to-morrow 
to dedicate that church, I want you to teU him 
I have seen to that myself." Then the saint said, 
" I see you have caught no fish, so I will tell you 
what to do. When you have set me ashore, you 
must pull out to that bend in the river where 
you will find all the fish you want, and mind these 
two things beside, if you want to prosper. Never 
go a-fishing again on a Sunday; and when you do 
go on any day, always send the tenth fish to the 
priests over yonder in my new church." It was 



58 CLEAR GRIT 

a very excellent and most wholesome charge that 
we can still give you, — those of us, I mean, who 
have charge of churches now, — never go a-fishing 
on a Sunday, and when you do go, be sure to re- 
member your ministers, especially when you catch 
salmon, for this was what Edric caught that night, 
— a whole boat load of salmon. 

This is the story of the dedication of West- 
minster Abbey, which was built then of logs, no 
doubt, and a very small place. It sounds like a 
dream to us, but it was very real to the men and 
women of that time, and this was what came, I 
am glad to say, of the dream, if it was one, that 
for hundreds of years this church at Westminster 
was held to be free from the bishop because St. 
Peter had stolen a march on him that night, and 
what some of us like to remember just as well or 
better, for almost 700 years those who fished in 
that bend of the river always sent the tenth fish 
over to those good ministers because St. Peter 
had told them to do so. There was a lawsuit 
about it once, and they brought Edric's story 
in as evidence and then our claim was allowed to 
the tenth fish, and as late I notice as 1382, the head 
of the fisherman's guild in London still brought 
a great salmon to the cathedral once a year, which 
was carried in a solemn procession through the 
church, and then was boiled and eaten to the praise 
and glory of the good old saint. 

The first church of a real splendor and beauty 
was built by Edward the Confessor, or rather by 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 59 

men of England in his time, who gave the money 
and did the work while he got the credit for it, 
as is apt to be the case when you run after kings, 
and he stands in the calendar now as the saint 
who built the Abbey. 

Let us have a look at him. Edward was a man 
of a milk and rose-pink complexion, with snow 
white hair and eyelashes like the people you see 
in the circus. He had long, thin hands also, 
through which the light would shine as if they 
were fine porcelain, and could take your pain 
away if you were the right man by stroking you 
gently with those long, thin hands, so that it was 
believed he could work miracles, and he was very 
good to the poor in the way of giving them money. 
But they say he never gave mortal man a good 
square look in the face, was hard on his mother, 
and treated his wife with the grossest neglect. 
He was ready also to swear on the gospels to-day 
and break his word to-morrow, so that you never 
thought of trusting anything he swore to with 
especial solemnity. Carlyle says the old meaning 
of the term king is can, the king is the man who 
can. Edward was the man who can't and canted. 
He could break out into a great rage and swear 
at prince or peasant, nobody knew why, and could 
laugh at himself when he was through ; while there 
was a sort of humor in him also, but rage and 
laugh and humor were alike out of place in such 
a man. Hugalin, his steward and right hand man, 
was a faithful fellow who tried hard to make ends 



60 CLEAR GRIT 

meet for his silly and wasteful majesty, and got 
his labor, of course, for his pains. Edward was 
taking a nap one afternoon in a chamber where 
the money was kept that Hugalin had scraped to- 
gether to pay the servants. The chest was open, 
and a rogue passing by, saw the money, and think- 
ing Edward was asleep, crept in to help himself, 
but the white eyelashes stirred, for the king was 
watching him, and was vastly amused. He broke 
out into peals of laughter, and cried, " Hurry, 
man, hurry, if Hugalin catches you, not a penny 
will you get." The rogue took him at his word 
and got all there was. Then Hugalin came in, 
saw the empty chest and cried, " Why, your 
Majesty, where is that money?" "All gone," 
the king cried, rolling over with delight, when he 
could catch his breath. " I told the rogue who 
stole it to hurry, as you would not give him a 
penny." Nor would the saint ever say who was 
the rogue he let go free to steal again. 

The only manful thing he could do was to hunt. 
If he could have tackled the Danes as he tackled 
the wild things that run and fly, the story of Eng- 
land might have taken another course. But this 
was not to be. The truth is, as we can see now, 
the time had come for the infusion of a quicker 
manhood into the gross and sluggish Saxon life 
which had laid England open to the sea kings of 
the north, the time to lift the mother land into 
her splendid place among the nations, and so this 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 61 

man of the long, thin hands let her drift on to her 
destiny. 

Well, this was the man in whose day the first 
grand minster was built; and now I must tell you 
how it was done. Edward had lived abroad some 
years waiting for his turn at the throne of Eng- 
land, and had got himself tangled up in a vow 
that if St. Peter would pull him out of some nasty 
hole he had got into, then he would make a pil- 
grimage to his sepulcher in Rome. So when he was 
well crowned, he told his noblemen all about it 
and proposed to start, but they told him roundly 
he should do no such thing. " Those Romans," 
they said, " covet the white silver and the red 
gold as a leech covets blood, and will take all 
your treasure, and ours also." But as a compro- 
mise they said they would build a grand church 
for St. Peter in London, and this, no doubt, would 
please the saint just as well. Still Edward 
doubted. He did not mind breaking his word to 
those about him, but Peter might be turning the 
keys on him, by and by, and so he hesitated until 
he could hear from the saint. And this was the 
way the word came. 

There was a hermit away off near Worcester 
whose dwelling was in a cave deep down in the 
gray rock, who lived on roots and water and was 
counted a very holy man indeed, and who should 
come to him in a vision but St. Peter, " bright and 
beautiful as a clerk." He bade the hermit go tell 
the king that it would be all right and they must 



62 CLEAR GRIT 

build the new minster on the site of the little 
church that he had dedicated more than 400 years 
before in Sebert's time. Thus it was settled that 
the money and the king should stay in England. 
So the books set forth how the first minster was 
built by this Edward; but it was built by the 
people of England, for Edward would have taken 
the treasure that built it to Rome if he could have 
had his own way, and the poorest man who worked 
on the job did more really and truly to build 
Westminster than the king did, after all. 

It would be something of a wonder again to 
build a church of such splendor now in which 
Irishmen had no hand, and I find one at this very 
early day busy about the place, but he does not 
carry the hod. He is carried himself! Just as 
they were getting ready to pull down the old place, 
he slides within my glass and I notice his name 
is Michael. He was attracted to London, I pre- 
sume, by the news that Edward would give his last 
dollar to the poor, but he had far too fine a genius 
for one of your common beggars. So he turns 
up one day on the road between the palace and the 
church sitting on a stool, the most deplorable 
cripple to look at in all London, and who should 
come along but poor Hugalin, the treasurer of 
the empty chest. How Micky would groan, you 
may easily imagine. He told Hugalin that he 
had been six times to Rome itself to persuade St. 
Peter to cure him, but it was all no use entirely, 
only the last time he was there, the saint told 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 63 

him to get away to London and seek out this new 
king, and if Edward would only carry him to the 
church sitting astride on his shoulders, there would 
be an end of all the trouble. Poor Hugalin did 
not like the look of things at all, but then he could 
not be sure the man was lying, and so he went 
back to the palace with the message St. Peter 
had sent from Rome. " By all means," the king 
cries, " where is the poor man to be found? " 
" Down yonder, your Majesty," he said, " sitting 
on a stool." So away goes the king, while I no- 
tice the courtiers are laughing behind their hands, 
but he gets Micky on his neck and trots away with 
him to the church, takes him right up to the altar, 
sets him down, and there stands Michael as 
straight as a lance, a,nd he hangs his stool on a 
nail for proof positive of his cure, just as they 
are hanging their crutches on nails in Ireland 
now, for similar proof, and I have no doubt he 
was well cared for the rest of his life. 

They were fifteen years building this church 
and spent on it one-tenth of the whole treasure 
of the kingdom. It was the grandest thing in 
stone England had seen since the days of the old 
Romans. There are some fragments of it welded 
into the church as it stands to-day. Fifteen years 
building — and when it was done, the king was 
drawing near his end and something like a touch 
of dignity begins to invest him, the dignity 
of death. Still he is the same old prodigal we 
saw fifteen years ago. A beggar comes to him 



64 CLEAR GRIT 

one day on the usual errand, and " Where is 
Hugahn? " the king cries, " I want some money ! " 
But Hugalin has seen the beggar, too, and slipped 
out of sight. Then Edward goes to the chest, 
but Hugalin has emptied that ; so he draws off his 
ring, large, royal and beautiful, and bestows it on 
the beggar for the love of St. John. Then, a 
few nights after this, as the story goes, in the 
very heart of Syria, two English pilgrims who 
have lost their way, meet a fine old man who 
guides them to a tavern, gives them that selfsame 
ring, bids them give it to Edward with all speed 
and bid him get ready, for in six months he will 
be in Paradise, and when in wonder, they ask his 
name, he answers, " I am St. John." 

It was at Christmastide in 1065 that the new 
church was dedicated, and what little life was left 
in Edward was exhausted in the great solemnity. 
Death struck him on the Christmas eve, but he 
lived ten days and died from the feet upward. 
And as he lay on his death bed, his wife, the 
woman he had sworn to nourish and whose life he 
had turned into one long misery, took him into 
her heart again as good women always do, held 
the stone cold feet in her lap and tried to warm 
them, and then at last, the white face grew still, 
and the king was dead. 

He lies buried in the very heart of the old min- 
ster. Six times in these 820 years men have seen 
his dust, and once they plucked a single hair from 
his long white beard. They made him a saint and 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 65 

forgot the evil for the sake of the good there was 
in him, but he was not the man for that time or 
for any time, when you want a king of the true 
old type. 

England's need was for a grand, strong man 
who could stand four square to all the winds that 
blow and who was all there every time, who durst 
speak and durst not lie, a man like King Alfred 
and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. 
He was not that man, and so when he was dead, the 
fight began which is going on still between the 
Norman and Saxon, which was to purify England 
as by fire and lift her also into her great place 
as the mother of the grandest republic the world 
has ever seen, a republic in which freedom is to 
be nourished, as we believe, through all the ages 
to come, and peace on earth and good will to men 
to be the battle cry of the new and better day. 

So this is the story which is blended with the 
building of the old minster. There was first a 
well, then a cluster of shanties, then a log meet- 
ing house, a garden, a bit of cleared land, and a 
fane. So they begin to make history very much 
as we do, you see, and Westminster is very much 
like our own frontiers, because in these things 
one day is as a thousand years and a thousand 
years as one day. 

In a time I can remember, this wonderful old 
place, however, had grown also to be a wonder- 
ful mean place. It was crowded with great mem- 
ories and burned with the glory of the old devout 



66 CLEAR GRIT 

days and was, as it is now, the shrine of England's 
greatness, the place of coronation, the most royal 
sepulcher, and the Valhalla of her heroes and men 
of genius. But this did not count for so much in 
those times to those who had the care of it, as 
the fact that it was one of the most popular 
shows in London, in which you paid your money 
and took your choice of what you wanted to see. 
And then they hauled you round and went through 
a curious sing-song about the kings, and ended 
up with some wax works which were a sort of side 
show, and then let you go home. Do you care 
for poetry? Here are some lines that tell the 
story of one who went there in those times I can 
so well remember. 

" I stood alone, a living man, 

Mid those that are no more, 

And thought of ages that are past 

And mighty deeds of yore; 

Of Edward's sabled panoply, 

And Cressy's tented plain, 

And the fatal roses twined at length 

In great Eliza's reign. 

And glorious Blenheim, — when at last 

Upon my startled ear, 

There came a sound so new and strange 

My heart was filled with fear, 

As from the showmen all about 

I heard these accents drop : — 

' Sarvice is out, it's sixpence now 

For them as wants to stop.' " 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 67 

But Dean Stanley put this scandal down with 
a strong hand, and now you can take your own 
time and think your own thoughts as you wander 
through the beautiful and sacred shrine. 

I remember how they let me sit in the chair, 
the last time I was there, in which all their mon- 
archs have been crowned for 570 years, and under 
the seat is the very stone, as the legend runs, that 
Jacob had for his pillow when he slept at Bethel. 
Some men say, to be sure, that there is no stone 
of that sort in Syria at all, and a great deal of it 
in Scotland, where the first Edward found it, and 
where it had been used for the coronation of 
the Scottish kings time out of mind ; but when you 
go abroad to see these wonders, it is best to walk 
by faith. Here, at any rate, is the coronation 
chair (there can be no doubt at all about that), 
and as you sit in it, you can think swiftly of those 
who have sat there in their day of pride and glory, 
and then been buried when their day was done, 
while the nation wept, or if they had done evil, 
were glad it was over. Here Charles the First sat 
to be crowned, and it was found that the dove was 
missing from the scepter, the emblem of peace, 
and the Bishop took a text fitter for a funeral 
than for a coronation, and an earthquake shook 
the old building as the ceremony of crowning him 
went on; and the people remembered all these 
things and laid them up in their hearts and told 
them at their firesides for many a year after 
Charles lost his head in the mighty quarrel be- 



68 CLEAR GRIT 

tween the king and the people. " What have you 
ever done? " old Sam Johnson, a Tory to the core, 
said to BoswelPs father, who was a man of the 
people. " We have done this," the old man an- 
swered, " we have let kings know there was a joint 
in their neck." 

And you can remember as you sit there how, 
when they were crowning the second King James, 
the crown tottered on his head and would have 
fallen, had not Henry Sydney caught it and set 
it steady. Still it did not stay there, for James 
had to run away to France. Yes, and when they 
were crowning George the Third, the finest jewel 
in his diadem fell to the ground, while Bonnie 
Prince Charlie, it is believed, sat in the great 
hallway, wondering what this meant. And this 
also was remembered by the people and spoken of 
at firesides when these states had won their inde- 
pendence and the finest jewel in the crown was 
lost to England forever. So passes the long 
panorama, as you look at the old chair and wonder 
whether there may not have been some stirring 
and muttering of fate in the lost dove, the totter- 
ing of the crown and the fallen jewel; some fore- 
gleam of the disasters history makes so true. 

Then you wander among the tombs of the mon- 
archs, — Ed^vard, the man we glanced at, in the 
center, and the noble and mean grouped about him 
as if his mingled nobility and meanness was the 
fitting welcome for them all, — Plantagenet, Tudor 
and Stuart, white rose and red rose, rival with 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 69 

rival and slayer with slain, at the death grip 
once, terrible in their anger and ruthless in their 
revenge, hating and hated, fearing and feared, 
with now and then a saint, but willful or brutal, 
or gentle and good, there they rest after the fitful 
fever, under the eyes of the eternal watchers. 

In the Cathedral of St. Denis in France was 
buried once the dust of seventeen kings and thirty- 
five queens. They dug them all out of their 
graves, threw them into a common pit and melted 
their coffins into bullets. But England stands 
sternly by the dust of her royal dead; she will 
allow no desecration; the paw of the old Lion 
is on them and he keeps steady guard. 

Our poor friend Hugalin is buried here too, and 
there must have been a happy chance in his 
resting place, for they laid him close to the door 
of the royal treasury, where for a good many 
centuries the money was kept for the uses of the 
kingdom. And near him is rough old Hundsdon, 
who was as true to Elizabeth as Hugalin was to 
Edward, and she promised him an earldom, but 
Bess cared more for her favorites than for her 
faithful servants and kept back the dignity until 
the old man was on his death-bed, and then she 
brought it to him with her own hands. But 
Hundsdon, looking at her sadly, said, " Madame, 
you did not think me worthy of this while I was 
living, but I do not think myself worthy of it now 
I am dying," and turned away and closed his 
eyes. He had done with earldoms forever and 



70 CLEAR GRIT 

ever. And near Hundsdon lies Burleigh, in whose 
epitaph on his tomb is this touch of deep sorrow, — 
" If you ask who is this aged man on bended 
knees, he was Elizabeth's great minister, and his 
eyes were dim with tears for one dearer to him 
than all the world beside." And the tomb of Sir 
Francis Vere, of whose still white marble a great 
sculptor said, when he saw it for the first time, 
" Hush, hush, and he will speak." 

So they meet you wherever you turn, — these 
tombs of the mighty men of England. They rest 
with royalty, they are buried among the kings. 
Some of the old tombs are beautiful beyond my tell- 
ing, and some are of the wretched days of the 
Georges and ugly as sin. One hapless man seems 
to be carried to the skies by impossible angels 
through impossible clouds of white marble on a 
sort of feather couch, and there are others of al- 
most unique ugliness ; but the grand lights of the 
windows above them fall solemnly and the vast 
vaulted arches make meanness look almost noble, 
and so you do not quarrel by and by with what 
you see in Westminster Abbey. 

" I have always observed," Irving says, " that 
visitors to the Abbey remain longest in the 
Poets' Corner." And this is true. I have found 
the Poets' Corner empty only once, and that 
was very early on a sweet summer Sunday 
morning, and that is a memory worth nourishing 
in the heart. Here you stand by Chaucer's dust, 
who sang England's morning song; and Spencer's, 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 71 

to whose burial Ben Jonson came, and, as we 
would fain believe, Shakespeare also. And 
Michael Drayton, who set the geography of Eng- 
land to a sort of rough music, and Ben himself 
in his turn, with the epitaph you all remember, 
" O rare Ben Jonson." " I have a favor to ask 
you," the old man said to the king. " Give me 
eighteen inches in Westminster Abbey." It was 
given, and Ben was buried standing on his feet. 
There they found him in 1849, still erect as they 
left him in 1637. And Cowley, of whom Charles 
said he had not left a better man in England, 
and Charles knew a good man when he saw him, 
bad as he was himself. And sturdy old John 
Dryden, who was buried with one of the odes of 
Horace for his funeral chant, for the old Mother 
Church has something like the hospitality in her of 
the great mother nature. Milton's monument is 
there, but Milton lies in Cripplegate, and Shake- 
speare's place is secure while he rests, as was best, 
in old Stratford. And so they touch you on all 
sides, these men of genius, down to Thackeray, 
whose family lived, once on a day, in a little hamlet 
close to my own home and were very humble peo- 
ple. 

And great actors are there, like the first Booth 
and Gar rick and Mrs. Siddons and John Kem- 
ble. Handel is there also to stand for the mu- 
sicians, and Newton for the philosophers, James 
Watts for the inventors, and Brunei for the 
builders, and of all the men in the world, Master 



72 CLEAR GRIT 

Thomas Parr, who won that great honor because 
men said he was 152 years old, and Thomas let 
them say so, for the rumor brought him cakes 
and ale, but he was no more 152 than you are. 
But these Englishmen, when you come to their 
grand central shrine, open out into a wonderful 
hospitality. Let death once set his seal in our 
time on a man of a superb genius or heroism, and 
they love to gather the dust then into the grand 
old minster. You find Puritans there and Cath- 
olics and skeptics side by side, and Elizabeth 
lies near to' Mary, the woman she put to death, 
and Pitt close to his life-long rival. Fox. Poets 
and painters, authors and actors, inventors and 
builders, novelists and divines, soldiers and Quak- 
ers. " Do your stroke of work for me and mine," 
the old mother says, " and win your right and you 
shall have your welcome. I reserve this one 
church for my noblest children and ask no more 
questions when they have made full proof of their 
nobility." 

And so this summer I went once and again to 
the grand old Abbey church. The first time it 
was crowded with the people, who went there in 
the main to visit the grave of England's grand old 
man, Gladstone. I stood by his grave also, but 
could not wander through the old fane and muse 
and touch the great old memories. But after 
some days, I went again, when all was quiet and 
but a few were there, wandered through the dear 
old place, sat down when I was tired, and dreamed 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 73 

of the days that are no more. It was the choicest 
visit I have ever made. It will stay with me all 
my life now. I needed no guide. I held it in my 
heart. I saw the solemn processions of 800 years, 
the living and the dead, and said, " After life's 
fitful fever, they all sleep well." Then I came 
out into the sunshine and the great city that held 
the conqueror at bay until he wrote the parch- 
ment they still treasure, and swore to refrain 
from touching her ancient liberties, the city 
which for 800 years has never seen the enemy 
from another land at her gates. And to the square 
to see the great lions, the emblem of the mighty 
manhood from whose loins we sprang. And 
then on, it may be that same day, to the House 
of Commons and heard two speeches, each of 
an hour, from Har court and Chamberlain. They 
were speeches well worth hearing, but the best 
in each to me was at the close, when for no 
special reason in the substance of what had been 
said, each man grew eloquent on the fair promise 
of the time, and as they trusted for all time, in 
the heart-beat of America toward England and 
of England toward the Republic, to which I said 
Amen, with all my heart. 



THE PILGRIMS 

The landing of the Pilgrims has been nursed in 
the heart of New England, and touched by her 
genius, until it has come to be accepted in our 
time as one of the most pregnant events in the his- 
tory of this new world and of man. And Ply- 
mouth rock, or the fragment, rather, that is left 
of it, has been lifted in the fond imagination until 
it stands so high and clear against the sky, that 
you might easily conclude some such change had 
been made in the sea line as that they notice on the 
coasts of Denmark where, within a time they can 
measure, the crags which were covered once by the 
ever returning tides, are hfted now to such an 
eminence as to be landmarks to men out at sea. 

The painter in both worlds has blended his 
choicest colors to portray the ship, the shore, and 
the quaint little company looking over toward the 
new home they are to have and to hold while the 
world stands. The poets have sung to the paint- 
ers and to all who have ears to hear, so that their 
strains storm you like the sound of trumpets and 
the voice of an host. Webster in the prime of his 
days touches the great story with his choicest elo- 
quence when two hundred years have come and gone 
since the pilgrims came ashore for good and all, 

74 



THE PILGRIMS 75 

blending the passion of the poet with the calm in- 
sight of the statesman, and striking the keynote 
for all who follow after him, touching the foun- 
tains of joy here, and there of tears, and speak- 
ing to such a purpose that after all this time his 
discourse keeps one space beautifully sweet and 
green over against the withering which fell on his 
own old age. It is no wonder, therefore, that 
those who find they are children of these Pilgrims 
after the spirit, though kinship after the flesh can 
never be theirs to be proud of and glad for, should 
feel drawn to this story which has come to be the 
first gem in the crown of our nation's dignity ; and 
that we should not be satisfied to meet on Pil- 
grim's day and celebrate the event by festivals 
which stand in such sharp contrast to the hungry 
outlook they faced so bravely who had to endure 
the winter of 1620 and the summer too, as things 
turned out, and had to endure other winters and 
summers heavy with disaster and death, to face 
the saddest of all experiences when the children 
cry for bread and the mothers have none to give 
them ample enough to lift the cloud from the small 
pinched faces and to hide utter content in the 
eager wondering eyes. Nor can we leave the 
bounty the land gives now out of the reckoning 
when we weigh the motives which stirred the hearts 
of these Pilgrims to their sublime adventure, be- 
cause we have to remember they were English men 
and women and then to remember that your gen- 
uine Englishman has never set himself to solve the 



76 CLEAR GRIT 

problem of how little a man may live on and still 
make his stroke, but how much he can win that the 
stroke may be made to the surest purpose while 
the man stands square on his feet and faces the 
horizon of his desire. 

Two things troubled the Pilgrims during their 
sojourn in Holland which are still vital as ever in 
the children of the great old mother. They could 
not bear to think of a day when their sons and 
daughters would forget the grand traditions of the 
old mother-land and lose their identity in that fine 
race that had said to the sea " thus far shalt thou 
come and no further and here shall thy proud 
waves be stayed " ; but had welcomed the sea as 
their defense against a more fatal tyranny. And 
then they could not bear to see what we have to' no- 
tice in thousands who come to our shores, the poor 
bent backs and lackluster eyes, and the faces 
grown old before their time which come through 
overwork and poor scant fare, and which was com- 
ing to them in the land where they had fled for 
shelter. 

But once more they were stirred by deeper and 
diviner motives than these, and so they came not 
only for the living but for what we may call 
dear life, and this makes their landing matter for 
Sunday thought as well as for week day eulogy, 
and compels us to see in them the sifted and 
selected seed for God's sowing over here. In the 
eighty-five years which had come and gone since 
Henry the king assumed the title of supreme head 



THE PILGRIMS 77 

of the church, it had grown clear to great num- 
bers that the Reformation in England needed itself 
to be reformed, and that there had not been much 
to choose when you came to the marrow of the 
matter between Pope Adrian and Pope Harry. 
So seven and twenty years before the Mayflower 
sailed from Plymouth in the old land to Plymouth 
in the new, it was found that there were twenty 
thousand English men and women frequenting con- 
venticles, as they were called, and sixteen years 
before she sailed it was recorded that three hundred 
ministers of the Puritan sort were silenced or im- 
prisoned or in exile. And to the shambling 
majesty who held the throne when the little band 
we call the Pilgrims began to gather, it was quite 
clear that you must think as the king did and 
those he set in authority. You must not dare to 
call your soul your own or he would know the 
reason why. " I will have one doctrine," this 
later Solomon said, " one discipline, one religion 
and one ceremonial; so never speak to me again of 
that matter, for if you get your own way, then 
Dick, Tom, Will and Jack shall meet and censure 
me and my council at their pleasure. These Puri- 
tans talk about my supremacy, but I know what 
will become of this if they are once in power; it 
will be no Bishop, no King, but I will make them 
conform or I will harry them out of the land or 
worse." 

Now the secret of the freedom of England and 
of these States centers, as it seems to me, just 



78 CLEAR GRIT 

here, — that when those who are in power begin 
to talk in this way there is sure to be a body of 
men ready to leap out and face the monstrous as- 
sumption, to defy both the thing and the sayer 
of the thing at all risks and all costs. So the 
Independent Church was born of this travail, and 
it touches the nerve of the question to notice how 
the old English blood was the first to grow hot. 
The ministers of the first independent churches we 
hear of were merely one Brown and one Smith and 
one Robinson, while no doubt the congregations 
were largely of the same sort — persons of quite 
no account when you set them against the majesty 
of church and the throne. 

The little band we have in our mind lived in 
what Leland had described many years before as 
" the mean townlet of Scrooby where he only saw 
two things worth mention, the church and a great 
manor house belonging to the Archbishop of 
York." There was nothing else to note, indeed, 
except a few farm houses scattered over the green 
land, for the mulberry tree Wolsey planted and 
that was standing within the last century in the old 
court garden, had not begun to sprout in Leland's 
day. William Brewster was tenant in this manor 
house under the Archbishop, postmaster and inn- 
keeper if it should please you to stay there. While 
holding a good office under government, and a good 
tenancy under my Lord of York, Brewster quietly 
ignored the risk he must run in defying them to 
their face and opened his great old manor house 



THE PILGRIMS 79 

for the meeting of these Independents, counting 
the reproach of Christ greater riches than the 
treasure of the office and the farm; and as they 
gathered in from the angles of three countries 
which touch about there, and were poor folk in 
the main, he gave them good entertainment as well 
as house room free of all cost. It goes without 
the saying again that he lost his office and his 
house when the news got to the right ears of his 
contumacy, for there would be plenty ready to 
carry the news on the chance of getting the office 
then, as there would be now. 

This was the nest of the Pilgrims, and from 
there they went as you know to Holland, where 
we cannot follow them, but must take them up as 
they cross the Bay from Clarke's Island, after that 
stormy passage on which they were sixty-six days 
out of sight of land, while it may well be doubted 
whether there was another vessel then anywhere 
between the old world and the new world of North 
America. 

Very homely folks they were in the main, I 
said, and humble, who were to land that day, for 
the old truth had come to the front again we 
have to note so often in the most momentous 
things men can do, that " not many wise men after 
the flesh, not many mighty, and not many noble 
are called," as the world defines nobility. Still 
there was gentle blood among them when they left 
Holland, men of education and learning, and of 
the captain's heart and brain to order the battle 



80 CLEAR GRIT 

if the need came and to man the guns, but there 
was not a title from church or state to deck the 
Httle band with a single gleam of the glory on 
which the world set such store. Here is Brew- 
ster; he has lived at the Court as retainer to a 
person of consequence and could tell you how to 
behave before the king, though he had the poor- 
est possible opinion of his majesty; he was one of 
those who said they would not trust him though he 
set a seal to his word as big as a house floor. 
Brewster stands there among the Pilgrims, they 
know his quality, and as they have no minister 
they beg that he will minister to them in holy 
things ; so he preaches to them twice every Sunday 
and does his own stroke of work on week-days until 
a regular minister shall venture over. But he 
will only be their minister on his own terms, for 
while they set store on long prayers, Brewster's 
prayers are short and right to the point, because, 
as he says, it is neither wise nor good for them to 
stand so long as they do bending before God. 
Brewster holds this office four years, a working 
man as they all are and without the ordination 
which was then thought to be indispensable even 
among some of the Puritans. So he was unable 
to administer the sacrament or to baptize the chil- 
dren, but they had no choice. And when they got 
a minister to come over he turned out to be insane, 
or they were fain to adopt this theory and to send 
him home. Then Brewster had to take charge of 
the pulpit again and of the little church. The bed 



THE PILGRIMS 81 

rock truth therefore is this — that the Pilgrims 
had a schoolmaster at work before they had an 
ordained minister — which is a parable we can all 
lay to our heart. 

Then you see Bradford in the little company; 
he comes from the neighborhood where the nest 
was, and is not yet nineteen, but is able to speak 
in six tongues. He is to be the historian of the 
adventure and for eighteen years the governor by 
common consent. 

And Edward Winslow is there, a man of the 
finest nature and nurture, whose portrait is the 
only one I think which has come down to us from 
the Pilgrims, and is as far as possible from the 
likeness we might have imagined of a sour-faced, 
crop-haired Puritan, but clearly the man they say 
he was, of a sweet life and just conversation. 

And Miles Standish, the stout little soldier, who 
knew all about standing guard and fighting when 
the time came, but could somehow never get re- 
ligion in the good old fashion, or tell you whether 
he had any to speak of, so he was never taken into 
the church he guarded from the heathen with his 
brave heart and strong hand. He must stand 
before God and take his chance on that question 
and bear his burden. He could do that bravely, as 
he shows us when he has the sore heart about the 
maiden he would fain have made his wife, had she 
not already lost her heart or given it to John 
Alden, the cooper. 

There is Samuel Fuller also, the doctor — a 



8^ CLEAR GRIT 

godly man they say, but I think I see a merry 
twinkle in Samuel's eye on a certain day after this 
and a merry smile about his mouth. For some 
reason I cannot learn, Samuel is compelled to leave 
his wife behind him; she cannot come or she will 
not come — it is all in a mist to me — but Samuel 
insists on bringing over the cradle, and so it is as 
if we heard him say " My dear, you will come when 
you are ready, but you will follow this, I know 
you will," and she did follow it of course. And 
it was a good providence, — that wise thought of 
Samuel, — for who should come wailing into this 
world of ours in mid-ocean but Master Peregrine 
White (whose grandson of ever so many removes I 
have talked with about these matters ) and who had 
such good right to the cradle as Master White? 
Some of you have seen it in the museum of the 
town of Plymouth, and when I see it I still imagine 
it is touched with the tender crowding thoughts 
that lay in a man's heart on this side the water, 
and a woman's heart on thaty when he had fastened 
a golden chain one end to the rocker and the other 
about the wife's heart and hand, and said to him- 
self, " This will draw her over the sea. I may have 
to wait, but she is sure to come." 

Again, as we think of the Pilgrim fathers and 
watch them through the wintry lights in which 
they stand that day, we must not forget the Pil- 
grim mothers and maids, gentlewomen like Mary 
Brewster, Rose Standish and Elizabeth Winslow, 
and women of a strong, sturdy life like Elizabeth 



THE PILGRIMS 83 

Howland who lived to be eighty-one, and Mary 
Cushman who was ninety when she went to her 
rest, stanch women all of them, who held their 
hearts high against the tempest, the savage, and 
the wilderness, while there was a spark of life left 
in them. Then when some of them knew they must 
die and leave the husband and the little ones to 
fight it out alone, they did not quail and fall, but 
were borne above the sorrow, and died with the 
light in their eyes and a psalm in their hearts, 
trusting in God. " These were the forerunners," 
as one says finely, " of the stout-hearted women 
of these States who have gone forth with their 
husbands, their fathers and their brothers, casting 
aside home comforts, domestic enjoyments in free- 
dom from fear and peril, that they might do their 
share in building up new homes and common- 
wealths all over the land." So the Pilgrim mothers 
stand there that day with the Pilgrim fathers, 
while if you had seen the fathers alone you would 
still guess the mothers must be somewhere about, 
because they are so clean and unlike men who have 
no women to see after them. 

And this brings me to another incident over 
which I like to linger as I read their story. 

They had come within the bend of the great 
protecting arm which reaches away out to Prov- 
incetown, and cast anchor. That day they were 
busy with the compact which is headed, " In the 
name of God, Amen," a document as noble in its 
way as Bacon's " Novum Organum," which was 



84 CLEAR GRIT 

published in this self-same year. The next day 
was Sunday, and that was held sacred for prayer, 
praise, and high discourse of God. But on the 
Monday, and a long while before it was day no 
doubt, you might have seen a movement on the 
little craft as when the bees are astir in the hive, 
when the Pilgrim maids and mothers came to the 
front, and their reason was this. They were the 
sort of women to whom cleanliness is next to godli- 
ness ; they had been cooped up in their narrow 
quarters all this time with no chance at all to have 
things as they loved to see them, but here was 
their chance ; the men must put them ashore that 
they might get to their washing. They went 
ashore, every woman, gentle and simple, and then 
no doubt the poor helpless men had to withdraw — ^ 
as Bunyan would say — to some distance. 

The historians say that Miles Standish with a 
fine soldierly impatience to know how the land 
lay, would wait no longer, but went off with certain 
comrades, but I think the women could have told 
us another story of his going. He found he was 
in the way, no doubt ; it was a mystery into which 
no man of the northern shires must enter when 
there is a woman of the shires bound to fulfill her 
mission on washing day. So they got things first 
pure and then peaceable, then they themselves, no 
doubt, were easy to be entreated, and now this day 
has taken its place in the Puritan calendar the 
world over, while we are clean through the word 
which was spoken in the gray dawn of the eleventh 



THE PILGRIMS 85 

of November, 1620, " we must get to our washing 
on Monday." 

So I love to linger over these hints of the gentle 
human life in the play of nature back and forth 
in the Pilgrims, because they touch the brighter 
side of the life they had to live with a finer grace 
and a lovelier color than we usually give them 
credit for. We can see, also, as we study their 
quality and attainment, that it is a great mistake 
to say the Pilgrims were of a low order or a sour 
spirit. Some were, perhaps, but even this does 
not appear. They were poor because they had 
made great sacrifices when they sold out and left 
their old home to go to Holland and lost what 
little they had left on the way. And there was a 
solemn strain in them, but this was one of the con- 
ditions of a faith which had fought its way 
through mutilation and martyrdom up to this wild 
coast line. This solemn strain is in those who in 
any time and place make a deep mark on their age, 
while it was entirely natural as it was most need- 
ful to the Pilgrims in their rugged and painful 
task. 

Two expeditions had come lilting over the sea 
to the sound of the lute and the viol. They had 
tried their fortunes far away to the south, where 
land and sun kissed each other for blessing and 
had come to naught. These Pilgrims had tried 
to win southward also, or to the Hudson where 
the sturdy Dutchman had got ashore and begun to 
fish and build. But the wind beat them north- 



86 CLEAR GRIT 

ward and the deep waters ran to shoal so that 
they could find no way. " In the name of God," 
they opened their grand compact and charter ; " in 
the name of God " they had come, and I love to 
think that He ordered their way before them to 
that wild shore, on which, in the first three 
months, they lost half their number and might 
well have said " it is no use, let us return." 
But here the deep and awful beat of the heart set 
on God struck in, and held them fast. The 
solemn strain swept over the graves into heaven 
and caught the answers of the everlasting life. 
They also were on Patmos and saw new heavens 
and a new earth; so they buried their dead, sent 
their psalms ringing through the storm, saw to 
their weapons and stood to the fight, when the 
savage struck the first blow, and sent him a snake's 
skin full of powder and shot in return for his 
sheaf of arrows, because they had come to stay. 
They took his com when they found it, and re- 
turned it with interest eight months after, because 
they had come to stay and knew they should not 
deserve to stay in robbery or repudiation. They 
built their stock-house, town-house, school-house 
and meeting-house all in one, and manned it with 
the soldier citizens, a schoolmaster and preacher 
who served them for " nothing a Sunday and find 
yourself," for these were the only terms Heaven 
would allow them. 

They gathered round a pint of corn, as the tra- 
dition runs, and there were five grains to each man. 



THE PILGRIMS 87 

They established universal suffrage (for men) and 
each brother had a vote, including Brother Stand- 
ish, who could not belong to the meetings but could 
hold his life cheap to defend it. 

Yes, and I notice they could hold their hearts 
open to the sweet scents and sounds of the woods 
and meadows when the sun came back, and the 
little touches they have sent down to us of their 
joy read like Chaucer as he sings of the time 

" When April with his showers sate, 

The drought of March has pierced to the rate. 

And the small fowls maken melody 

That sleeps all night long with open e'e." 

So they are Puritans, stanch and stern if you 
will, but there was a sunny and gentle heart under 
the russet and the steel which could sing to its fel- 
lows of good cheer after the use and wont of old 
England. They could croon over old rhymes 
about cradles with half a sense that they had 
better say a psalm. They could fall in love as 
Priscilla did and John, and manage to have their 
own way about it against the stout old captain. 
And then they could die, but they could not turn 
back on their election as the first handful of 
selected and sifted seed sown by the hand of the 
Eternal God. 

It is a truth we may well lay to heart also, that 
these Pilgrims did not start out to make money as 
the great end of their life, but to serve God, to live 
as free Christian men and women and " join them- 



88 CLEAR GRIT 

selves into a church in the fellowship of the gospel, 
to walk in the ways God had made known or should 
make known " so that their covenant easily covers 
us also, and will as easily cover those we shall 
unchurch when we become the dominant power. 

It is very touching to hear John Robinson tell 
them before they start that they are well weaned 
from the delicate milk of the mother land — he 
might have said sour milk in their case — were 
already inured to the difficulties of a strange 
country, and were not as men small things can dis- 
courage. They may have had their faults and 
failings, but these words must stand. The Pil- 
grims sought first to make the dream come true of 
a commonwealth of English-speaking folk who still 
loved England, whose grand idea should be holi- 
ness to the Lord, and they were so true to this and 
so right in it that a writer who lived twelve years 
among them and notes with a pardonable little 
frisk that he is held to be a very sociable man, 
says that in all this time he did not hear one oath, 
see one man drunk, or hear of more than three 
who had been guilty of gross sins. 

This was what came at once of their simple God- 
like purpose, of the prayers and tears, of the living 
word and of their perpetual return to heaven for 
direction. The whole body of them fall on their 
knees on the frozen ground to ask God for direc- 
tion before they can feel sure that this was the site 
of the town they were to build in His name, yes, 
and I warrant you not one of them was looking 



THE PILGRIMS 89 

out of the corner of his eye to see where he should 
select his corner lot. 

And now this noble tongue they loved is spoken 
from ocean to ocean, while a larger religious free- 
dom, and a sunnier and sweeter thought of God 
than they could have endured, is winning its way in 
the hearts and minds of their children; and the 
children who inherit our estate as we inherit theirs 
will see more and be more than we are by the 
measure of our time with theirs as they stood on 
that wild shore, if we are as faithful as they were 
to God and to our trust, for, 

" The word of the Lord by night 
To the watching Pilgrims came, 
As they sat by the seaside. 
And filled their hearts with flame. 

" God said, I am tired of kings, 
I suff^er them no more; 
Up to my ear the morning brings 
The outrage of the poor. 

" I will have never a noble, 

No lineage counted great; 

Fishers and choppers and ploughmen 

Shall constitute a state. 

" Call the people together. 
The young men and the sires. 
The digger in the harvest field, 
Hireling and him that hires ; 



90 CLEAR GRIT 

" And here in a pine state-house 
They shall choose men to rule 
In every needful faculty, 
In church and state and school. 

" I break your bonds and masterships, 
And I unchain the slave: 
Free be his heart and hand henceforth 
As wind and wandering wave. 

" So the word of the Lord by night 
To the watching Pilgrims came. 
As they sat by the seaside, 
And filled their hearts with -flame, ^* 



THE HUMAN GEORGE WASHINGTON 

I SUPPOSE the most of you have noticed that the 
drift of our time is away from Washington 
the man toward Washington the myth, so that the 
real man as he lived has begun to grow dim to us, 
and a wonderful presence is taking his place, which 
only resembles Washington, as marble resembles 
flesh and blood. 

And I think this is a great pity, because a good 
man is always more of a satisfaction to us than 
his ghost, though the ghost be ever so stately. We 
like the hand that will grasp ours as if it meant 
something, the sound of a foot which comes down 
strong and true, and a laugh which moves to 
laughter, but we miss all this in the Washington 
of our era, and are gradually forgetting it was 
ever there. And so I want to touch the human 
heart and life of him to-night in some poor fashion, 
and shall speak, 

I. Of his family, 

II. Of his early life, 

III. Of his manhood, and 

IV. Of his later age and end. 

I. It is said of some families that they are like 
a hill of potatoes, — the best of them is under- 
ground, — but the Washington family grows as 

the oak grows, an acorn first and then a sapling, 

91 



9^ CLEAR GRIT 

a fair young tree, and then Washington the mighty 
oak, and there is nothing beside then except sticks. 
There is not much in the name for six hundred 
years. 

If the king took a man's head off in the Middle 
Ages it was usually because he was either too great 
or too good to live, but no Washington that I 
know of was beheaded. If the people sang ballads 
about a man, that was their way of showing there 
was a salt of real worth in him above his fellows ; 
there is no old ballad that I know of about a Wash- 
ington. I conclude, therefore, that the family 
never made much of a figure in the Middle Ages. 

One of them I notice was a monk and went 
stoutly into a fight for the rights of his abbey. 
Another of whom I have a very good opinion in- 
deed lies buried in an old church in England with 
his wife and fifteen children all resting near him, 
while one was a cavalier and fought for Charles 
against Cromwell. And this is about all there is to 
tell. The name never rises into greatness until 
it comes to our Washington; but then it is never 
touched by a shadow of disgrace. There is no 
great meaning to the name until he gives it one, 
and then only that he gives it. He stands for 
himself like Homer, Shakespeare and Newton. 
The old motherland started the young tree well ; 
but the mighty oak and the heart of oak, which 
will be just as sound in a thousand years as it is to- 
day, the Providence that shapes our ends wanted 
these for a new world and a nobler purpose. 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 9S 

n. I take this to be true again with respect to 
his early life, that Master George was very much 
like other children and not at all like the children 
in the good books, who die young. The young 
gentlemen at Harvard made a ballad once of which 
this was the burden, that to be as good a boy as 
Washington you must cut down a cherry tree and 
then tell your father that you cannot tell a lie. 
Well, the story of the cherry tree is the first of the 
mj^ths. There is not the least authority for it in 
any record you can trust. Old Mr. Weems was 
the first to tell it, but those who knew him best, 
believed in him the least. And there is one thing 
in the story I should be very sorry indeed to believe 
was true, that is, where the father makes the boy 
incriminate himself. This is what we shrink from 
in a court of justice; it is what we should never do 
in the home. I have not the least doubt, that if 
the boy had cut down the cherry tree he would have 
told the truth, however, because he was his mother's 
boy ; and of the few books that have come down to 
us from these early days the one belonging to his 
home and family, which is most worn, is a book 
on morals by that great pattern of the English 
integrity. Sir Matthew Hale, and the place where 
it is most dog-eared and frail from frequent use is 
a chapter on the great account we must all give of 
the deeds done in the body. 

But I have no doubt that the little fellow could 
play his pranks, and get into a mischief very much 
as all boys do who make their mark afterward as 



94 CLEAR GRIT 

men of action. One incident of this sort is pre- 
served. His mother had a young mare nobody 
could mount ; she had beaten all the horse breakers 
that had taken her in hand. Well, Master George 
made up his mind he would break that mare. So 
he managed somehow to leap on her back and turn 
her head to the open, and away they went like the 
wind, and I suppose he felt he was in a fair way 
for breaking her in, when she broke her own neck. 

He was fond of playing at soldiers, too, but then 
he always would be the captain, they say, and from 
what we know of boys he would have to earn his 
post in many a well fought battle. He was swift 
of foot also and could beat young Dade at last, 
who had kept the belt against all comers until 
Master George went in to take it from him. So 
this no doubt is the truth, that Washington as a 
boy was very much alive. 

There was mischief in him but no meanness, and 
no cowardice. He was a good boy because he was 
a whole boy, and this is to me as good a thing as 
we can wish for. 

Let the lad's life be in him fresh and full. The 
bounding ball of it! The white fire of it! The 
whole delight of it — and the splendid energy ! He 
may be, then, as wild as a March hare, as mischiev- 
ous as a monkey, as untameable as a fly. Up and 
down like the mercury in May, democrat and auto- 
crat in one, asking questions doctors in divinity 
cannot answer, and answering questions they dare 
not ask. Give me such a boyhood, with the wisdom 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 95 

and grace to guide it, and I will ask for no better 
gift in the shape of a boy for my son or grandson. 

Washington fell in love before he was fifteen, 
but it is supposed the maiden can no more be iden- 
tified than Junius. I remember coming to the con- 
clusion that this must have been a mistake and 
there was no such maiden, because if there had 
been she would have told that other maiden, her 
dearest friend, and then we should all have known 
hy this time also. 

He wrote poetry about the maiden, and it is 
very deplorable poetry indeed. He never went to 
college, but then he was far too sensible a man to 
look down with the least disdain on a college grad- 
uate, and in this he might teach some graduates 
a lesson they need to learn. He was great at fig- 
ures, however, and as you know had a very pretty 
turn for surveying land; so' before he was sixteen 
he would sometimes earn twenty dollars a day. 
And this was the way he grew from boyhood to 
manhood, helping to work the great farm, and out 
in the wilderness, surveying; educating himself as 
well as he was able, when he could find time, but 
always very uncertain in his spelling. 

What never seems to have occurred to him 
was that he had any time to' dawdle about do- 
ing nothing, or to sow his wild oats, and take 
his chance at the crop when old age drew on. He 
was a whole boy, I said, and I venture to say also, 
that when his youth was over he was a whole man. 
It is well worth knowing also, that when he was a 



96 CLEAR GRIT 

man full grown, he stood six feet two in his stock- 
ings. It is also a comfort to some of us to know 
that he had probably the largest hands of any 
man in the thirteen colonies. Timothy Pickering 
used to say that his hands were the next in point 
of size, but he had never seen the man whose hand 
could match Washington's. How he managed 
about kid gloves, or how he felt when the young 
aristocrats of Virginia with their lovely little hands 
would look at him and wonder how he could exist 
with such paws, there is no record. It may be 
he had an idea that as God had given him these 
mighty hands he meant him to take a mighty grip 
on something before he was through, and so it was 
all right. 

He had also great muscular arms and a vast 
deep chest and could hurl a rock with the momen- 
tum of a young giant. 

And then I have found this out about him, that 
though as the events proved presently he was as 
brave as a lion, he was at the same time as bashful 
as a girl. The young maidens when he went into 
company would talk to him, and try to make him 
talk by those plots and surprises that are as old 
as Eden, and the young fellow would blush and 
stammer and try to answer them, and break down, 
and feel bad enough, no doubt. He never got over 
this bashfulness, try as he might, except when 
there was that to say there was a mighty need 
should be said ; and when it was a question of life 
and death set the young man talking to the In- 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 97 

dians, who were plotting to murder and scalp de- 
fenseless settlers, or to the agents of the great 
Louis, who were plotting for the mastery of the 
continent, or to shout ringing orders in the early 
frontier battles, then see whether he could talk 
without a blush or stammer! The only presence 
so far in which his heart sank and his voice failed 
him was the presence of these pure maidens, and 
the only artillery he was afraid of was the glance 
of their eyes. 

So I love this blush and stammer in Washington, 
I love to watch it and to think of it always as one 
of the most beautiful qualities in his earlier man- 
hood. It is a revelation of the perfect purity and 
grace of his own nature. Womanhood was to 
Washington what it should be to all young men, — 
as sacred as that of his own mother and sisters, as 
sacred as heaven and the angels that dwell in inno- 
cency forever. 

III. He married when he was thirty years old; 
and in winning his wife he seems to have known 
what he was about, for beside her beauty and good- 
ness Mrs. Martha Custis had a very great fortune. 
And this brings me to consider Washington's abil- 
ity as a man of business. 

There is a vague idea that great men despise 
money and cannot attend to business as common 
people do. Now this may be true of some great 
men, but I think it is not true of the greatest. 
Webster and Sir Walter Scott, Shelley and Byron 
were very poor business men ; but Shakespeare and 



98 CLEAR GRIT 

Wordsworth, Washington and Lincoln were so 
good that in their own way there are no better. 
The gentlemen of Virginia in those days left the 
care of their estates to their stewards and knew 
very little about their management, but Washing- 
ton keeps his own accounts perfectly, and sees to 
his weights and measures so carefully, that after 
his trade-mark was once well known a barrel of 
flour with the Washington brand on it went 
through any part in the West Indies without in- 
spection. 

And as he could not cheat, so he could not be 
cheated. He had some carpenters to work for 
him once, and thought they did not do a fair day's 
work when he was away from home, and was not 
watching them. So he sat down quietly in the 
shop one day and made notes of how long it took 
a man to get his saw ready, then how long it took 
him to think about the best way to do the job, then 
how long it took him to do it, if he worked fairly 
along, and after that they were kept up to a fair 
standard. 

Again, he had a room that needed plastering and 
sent for a man from Baltimore, who agreed to do 
it for so much a foot. It was done in his absence ; 
the clerk paid the man on his own estimate. 
Washington measured the room when he got home, 
and found the man had overcharged him about 
four dollars. He made a note of it and presently 
when the man died, and his widow married again 
and advertised for all claims and debts on the 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 99 

estate, Washington sent in his claim and collected 
it. 

He owned certain ferries also on the river. 
General Stone crossed at one of these one day and 
offered a gold piece for change. The ferryman said 
it was light and Washington would hold him for 
the difference. The General left six cents to cover 
the damage ; it was found to be three cents short ; 
Washington screwed the other three in a piece 
of paper and when the general crossed again 
the change was handed back to him, — three 
cents. 

He was traveling with his servant in those days 
and stopped with the man for breakfast at a tav- 
ern. The landlord charged ninety-four cents for 
the master and seventy-five for the man. " But 
that is not fair," Washington said. " My man 
eats as much as I do ; I must pay nineteen cents 
more," and he paid it. 

He went in once with his blacksmith, Peter, to 
make a new plow of his own invention, and 
worked at it as a sort of helper to Peter until it 
was finished. " Now, Peter," he said, " I will go 
out and try the thing." So he tried it, and nearly 
ruined a splendid span of horses before he con- 
cluded he was not cut out for a plow maker and 
need not take out a patent for his invention. 

Again a great storm came up one da}^, and his 
mill was in danger of going down the stream ; he 
turned out with his men, took a shovel and wheel- 
barrow, went to work in the driving tempest, and 



100 CLEAR GRIT 

was allowed to have done more hard work than 
any other man on the job that day. 

But then this is to be noticed, — that while 
Washington went everywhere and saw to every- 
thing on his great estate down to the jot and tittle, 
he never grew close and mean, but while he knew 
where every penny went he kept a state equal to 
his fortune and standing. He had liveries made 
in London for his servants, and silver trappings 
for his horses with the Washington Crest on them. 
He got also from London three scarlet and gold 
sword knots, three in blue and silver, and a gold^ 
laced hat of the first fashion for himself, and no 
doubt was very proud of his headgear. The truth 
is that in these things, as in so many other things, 
Washington was an all-sided man. He could take 
three half-pence and return the other three, wheel 
a barrow and calculate on a breakfast. But then 
there were reaches in his nature where money was 
no more to him than the clay on his boots if it 
stood in the way of his high duty. 

Let Washington be remembered when we see how 
he could take care of his money, as the man who 
could give it also with a boundless generosity. 
He drew no pay so far as I know in the war of the 
Revolution and paid $75,000 out of his own purse. 
Let every public servant in our day who shirks the 
work but always draws the salary hide his face in 
this majestic presence. Washington did freely, 
without pay, what such men make believe to do 
and are paid for, and in the most pinching times of 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 101 

the war he would write from the camp to the good 
wife Martha : " Be sure my dear that no one is 
ever sent hungry from our door." So this is the 
best picture I can make for you of the man in his 
home and about his business, and now I must speak 
of him passing from his home and the care of his 
estate into the leadership in the Revolution of 
1776. 

And while it may startle you for a moment when 
I say this, I know that a moment's reflection will 
make my statement good, that Washington was 
not one of the men who inaugurated the Revolu- 
tion, while it is very doubtful indeed whether there 
would have been one in that age if it had been left 
to men of his make to open the ball. 

Take your map, stick a pin in New England 
first, then in Massachusetts, then in Boston, then 
in Faneuil Hall in the town of Boston, then hunt 
up Sam Adams and set him down in Faneuil Hall 
and there you have the roots, and the tap-root of 
the Revolution. 

In Sam Adams, of all men, you find the bit of 
fierce white fire for freedom which struck into the 
dry tinder, and set the world afire. Washington 
was true to the land in every beat of his heart, 
from the first day to the last, let us be sure of that. 
But Adams was in danger of transportation as 
early as 1763 for his resistance to the encroach- 
ments of the crown, and ten years later he was 
down in a secret list of the men who were deemed 
traitors to the government. 



10£ CLEAR GRIT 

But while Adams was down in this list, and in 
danger of his life, Washington was visiting and 
hunting with Lord Dunmore and was held in great 
esteem by that royal officer. When the battle of 
Lexington was fought Adams cried, " What a 
glorious day," but Washington wrote what a de- 
plorable affair, and twenty days after Lexington, 
Washington joined with some other members of 
Congress in a humble and dutiful petition to the 
king, which John Adams denounced as an imbecile 
measure. 

The truth is that the pioneers of freedom in New 
England were as untameable then as they always 
are, the first to feel the iron glove under the silken 
glove, to spring on the tyranny, get a good grip 
on it and hold on until the rest came up, and it 
was New England, not old Virginia, that made 
Washington commander in the fight, and Sam 
Adams saw that measure through ; so I think that 
God put Adams in the front and Washington in* 
the center and each was the predestined man for 
the place. Adams was a Puritan republican, 
Washington a Virginian gentleman ; Adams wanted 
to see New England a sort of Christian Sparta 
with the meeting house added and the slave left out, 
Washington nourished the old loyalty toward 
everything deep-rooted, that had kept his family 
out of trouble all through the Middle Ages ; but 
Adams was a prophet, and a prophecy of revolu- 
tion tingled in the blood of those about him from 
16S0 to 1776, because that and that only could 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON lOS 

make good the grand purpose, for which the Puri- 
tans came over the sea. 

But this, when you look into it, is still most hon- 
orable to Washington. His heart was full of the 
hereditary loyalty to England. No man of that 
house had ever taken sides against the king. His 
dear old friend Bryan Lord Fairfax was a Tory to 
his heart's core — and these were the days that de- 
ceived the very elect. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson thundered out " audacious 
malignity " ; John Wesley cried, " The thought of 
such a conspiracy makes me shudder ; " Whitfield 
thought the world was coming to an end, and was 
quite clear the Colonies were going headlong down 
to the pit of hell. 

And no man in the Revolution, so far as I know, 
had to cut such cables of wealth and friendship 
for the good cause as George Washington. The 
wealth would all be lost if the king succeeded in 
whipping the Colonies back into submission again, 
and the friends must go with the first crash and 
the pride of a loyal house. 

The father of Jefferson was a backwoods farmer. 
Patrick Henry had to go behind the counter when 
he was sixteen, because of his father's embarrass- 
ments. Sam Adams had to leave college before his 
education was finished, because his father was bank- 
rupt. Young Hamilton's father was a bankrupt, 
and poor as a church mouse used to be before cake 
and coffee became a means of grace. John Adams 
was the son of a small farmer and shoemaker in 



104 CLEAR GRIT 

Bralntree, and Franklin the son of a soap boiler 
in Boston. All honor to these men! Their pov- 
erty and obscurity only make their names shine all 
the brighter. But here is a man worth a quarter 
of a million dollars, who knows the worth of three 
cents, whose whole fortune must be forfeited if the 
revolution fails and the king proves master. A 
man also with no inbred liking for a revolution in 
his nature, but shrinking from it with a touch of 
dismay. 

This man comes forward and casts all he has and 
all he is worth into the scale there trembling with 
the fortunes of the new born republic. He saw the 
star in the East, went where the new-born re- 
public lay, offered it the gold of his possessions 
and the frankincense and myrrh of his sweet name, 
and then from that day he had no other purpose on 
the earth except to serve the good cause with his 
whole heart, and do what could be done at that 
time to establish freedom on a sure foundation in 
this New World. 

IV. But once more we can never understand 
what a grand true man he was, until we get rid of 
the idea that he was, a great general in the sense of 
winning battles and that his career in this respect 
was something like that of Cromwell. Lexing- 
ton and Bunker Hill were fought before he came 
from the South to take the command. The first 
battle of great moment was Long Island ; he lost it 
and had to give up New York. He lost Brandy- 
wine and had to retreat to Germantown, then he 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 105 

lost Germantown and had to give up Philadelphia. 
Bennington was won by Stark, and Saratoga, 
which Creasy ranks among the fifteen decisive 
battles of the world, was won by Gates and Arnold, 
while Irving thinks that the safety of the army 
after Trenton came from the stupidity of the 
enemy. Trenton and Princeton were only moder- 
ate successes, and Yorktown, of all the battles 
Washington ever fought, resulted in a great vic- 
tory. 

But here again we find our man. It was not so 
much in his victories over the enemy, as in his 
grand courage and patience under defeat that we 
trace his greatness. 

The oak I have taken for a type of his manhood 
strikes down new clumps and cables against the 
storm, and so did this man. Let it blow any sort 
of big guns ; there he was holding on and growing 
stronger through all the tempests. He went into 
the Command with fourteen thousand men, of which 
nine thousand were from Massachusetts. He held 
on six months before Boston, almost without 
powder, and disbanded one army and collected an- 
other within musket shot of the enemy's outposts, 
— held on again after Long Island, when his men 
were leaving him by regiments, and when he be- 
lieved that in ten days he would not have two 
thousand men to fight Lord Howe. He was steady 
as the Catskills through the cabals that rose all 
about him when the fierce white light of Saratoga 
shot over the gloom of Brandywine, and said, " If 



106 CLEAR GRIT 

the cause only is advanced I am glad, let the reason 
lie where it will." He went into Valley Forge and 
starved there and froze through the bitter winter, 
rather than quarter his troops in one of the rich 
country towns and leave the land open to the 
enemy. He held on there with near three thousand 
men disabled by hunger and exposure, poorly clad, 
without blankets, and without animal food for a 
week at a time. There was no end of good eating 
close at hand in Philadelphia, and parties and balls 
were going on at a great rate, and supplies are on 
the road only they do not come, while he appeals to 
Congress in vain and says, " My troops are sleep- 
ing under the frost and snow without clothes or 
blankets " ; and in a private letter to a friend he 
says, " Our situation brings me many a sad hour 
when all beside are asleep. I have often thought 
how much happier I should have been if I could 
have shouldered a musket and gone into the ranks." 
And then he strikes the keynote in another letter 
when he says, " I think our affairs are brought to 
this sore crisis that the hand of God may be seen 
the more clearly in our deliverance, and the many 
remarkable interpositions of the divine govern- 
ment in the hours of our deepest distress have been 
far too striking to suffer me to doubt the final 
issue of this war." 

And here I want to say a word about these re- 
markable interpositions in connection with Wash- 
ington's own life. He never speaks about them 
or seems to think of them, but I think we can set 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 107 

them now standing out in very clear relief. I said 
just now that he was the predestined man for the 
place and time. I believe in such men, and that 
when such a man comes into this world he has to 
stay until the work is done to which he was elected, 
shall I say, from the foundation of the world. 

So Columbus could not be wiped out, as we say, 
while he was wandering over Europe seeking trans- 
port to this new world, or Luther be killed by a 
falling tree as he toddled about in the forest, or 
Cromwell tumble and break his neck, when he was 
in that peril as a boy, or Wesley be burnt up as a 
baby in the flaming parsonage, or Lincoln die of 
the croup or the measles as he ran wild in the wil- 
derness down yonder southward. 

Let us make up our mind, there is a divinity that 
shapes such ends and then see how this truth fits 
Washington. 

When he was a youth he wanted to serve in the 
royal navy and was ready to go on shipboard, but 
his mother's heart failed her and she could not let 
him go. How could she let him go when unawares 
she had borne and nursed him for his great des- 
tiny? Nor could he die of smallpox in the Bar- 
badoes, when he was seized with this fearful thing, 
and it was all but certain death to have it in such 
weather ; or die of the cold if he escaped the acci- 
dent when he plunged through an ice pack into 
ten feet of water in the Allegheny ; or be shot by 
his Indian guide, when he turned on him and fired 
at fifteen paces ; or at Braddock's defeat, when he 



108 CLEAR GRIT 

had four bullet holes through his coat, and two 
horses shot under him. Once for all we must 
allow that this mystery of a providence had en- 
circled him all about, and the defense could not be 
broken until his work was done, and what is this 
but asking whether a great cause, and the only man 
who can carry it through, shall not be more than a 
match for what we call the doctrine of chances. 
I for one love to believe in such a providence about 
a man like Washington. Some things are set high 
above the accidents of life, and these are of that 
nature and number. 

But, as I have said, a great personal destiny was 
the last thing Washington thought of, and so not 
a hint of it ever creeps into his letters or speeches 
from the time he enters public life to the rest and 
quietness I will not say of his old age, for while 
from February, 1732, to December, 1799, is very 
near the line of three score years and ten, I never 
notice anybody speaks of him as old Mr. Wash- 
ington in those times. But now I must draw my 
story toward a conclusion. He w^as full of a sound 
and hearty human life to the last. He tells Louis 
Philippe, after he has retired from public life, that 
he always sleeps well because he has nothing on his 
conscience. Still there is a tradition that the good 
man was sometimes kept awake nights, for such a 
thing as a curtain lecture has come down to us 
among the traditions. We have to speak of such 
things with bated breath, but they do say that 
Martha had a temper and when things did not go 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 109 

to suit her she was apt to give him a piece of her 
mind when the good man had put on his night cap ; 
and that his usual reply was, " Well, well, my dear, 
I will see about it ; let me go to sleep." 

What I love above all things in Washington is 
his great, sound, loyal nature, passionate some- 
times but never sullen, manful but never masterful 
except when manhood and mastery are one and the 
same, as they should be. 

He could jump into the river after a fellow, a 
poacher who was drawing his trigger on him, pull 
him ashore in his own boat, give him a good thrash- 
ing and then let him go, and think no more about 
it. Leap into the midst of a mob at Cambridge 
that from snow-balling had taken to drawing blood, 
seize the ring-leaders by the throat, knock their 
heads well together and quell the fray. And he 
could kneel by the death bed of his small stepchild 
and moan out his heart that God would spare the 
child's life. And at the shameful stampede of 
some of his men in September, 1776, he could dash 
his hat on the ground in a grand rage, snap his 
pistols at them, and, if the truth must be told, 
swear like a very trooper. 

And yet he was not profane, nor did he tolerate 
profanity in those about him, for in one of his gen- 
eral orders he says he is sorry this habit is growing 
and hopes that the officers by their example will do 
all they can to check it, for he says, there can be 
but httle hope of God's blessing on our arms if we 
insult him by our impiety. He wept bitter tears 



110 CLEAR GRIT 

when he saw a number of his men bayonetted by 
the Black Hessians and could do nothing to save 
them, and laughed with a mighty laughter when 
he had sent Putnam to hunt down a dangerous spy 
and saw him return with the spy strapped on be- 
hind him on his horse in the shape of a wonderfully 
stout old lady, who could by no means be kept quiet 
but scolded to her heart's content. 

He could flash out, too, with a touch of the 
humor common to great natures, yet not so com- 
mon as to belittle them. He wanted to make a new 
camp once and rode out with his staff to select a 
site for it, when a trooper came shouting, " Gen- 
eral, the British are in the old camp." " Then, 
gentlemen," Washington said, '' it seems to me we 
have something else to do than select a new one." 

He was even capable of a touch of slang. I 
went over a great pile of letters once written to 
General Ward and held by his family at Marietta 
in Ohio, and in one of them he says : " My dear 
General, put a new sentinel at such a point. The 
fellow we put there last night ' went it ' and has 
joined the enemy." 

And then he was so human that Elkanah Wat- 
son, that wonderful old gossip, tells us how, going 
on a visit to Mount Vernon once, as Washington's 
life was drawing to its close, and being taken in 
the night with a very sore cough, who should come 
into his room but the General, who said, " I know 
how to stop that cough, Watson," went downstairs 
and made him a big bowl of herb tea, and sat on 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 111 

the bed in his nightgown until he drank the last 
drop of it, after which Elkanah sajs he was trou- 
bled no more, or if he was he took care to hide his 
head under the bed clothes, for fear he should have 
to take another dose of that tea. 

Watson also tells us how he went with Wash- 
ington, I think in his last summer, to an open air 
meeting at which a chair had been provided for 
the General, but he saw a poor woman holding a 
big baby in her arms, so he rose, insisted she should 
take the chair and stood until the services were 
over. 

And here is a note written in the last year of his 
life, in answer to an invitation to a young people's 
party, where there was to be dancing : " Self and 
Mrs. Washington are honored by your invitation, 
but our dancing days are over. We wish, how- 
ever, that all who relish so innocent and agreeable 
an amusement may enjoy all the pleasure it can 
afford them." 

And so I love this revelation of the man so 
manly, so tender and so full of our human life far 
beyond the cold and dignified disguises in which it 
has pleased our age to clothe him, so that the real 
man is hidden under the mask. 

And the end, when it came, was of a piece with 
all the rest. He died on the 14th of December, 
but on the 12th he was five hours in the saddle, 
yet he would not send his servant with the mail to 
Alexandria that day because it was too rough for 



lia CLEAR GRIT 

him to venture out. He was out again on the 13th 
marking trees to be cut down for the improvement 
of his estate, and so on the last whole day of his 
human life this man did a stroke of solid work in 
this world and then, when next day the end came, 
his last deed with those ever busy hands was to 
close his own eyes, and his last words were two 
little words of one syllable, I will not tell you 
what they were, because I want those who do not 
remember them to feel a little ashamed of that, 
they amount only to seven letters and a comma 
possibly, but he could not have said more, or bet- 
ter, because they are the sum and substance of 
his faith and hope. 

And now may we hear in one word of four letters 
the watchword of his life. The watchword was : 
Duty, — not ambition, not pleasure, not ease and 
quiet, and not gain, — but Duty! 

On the farm, in the wilderness, on the battle- 
field, and in the camp, and President of the repub- 
lic, boy and man, yeoman and gentleman, — this 
was the watchword. Fortune, fame and life must 
all be given at the call from on high. And so he 
has won this supreme place in the hearts of men on 
all the earth — 

" So may we join the choir invisible 

Of those immortal dead, who live again 

In minds made better by their presence — live 

In pulses stirred to generosity, 



THE HUMAN WASHINGTON 113 

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
Of miserable aims that end with self, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like 
stars." 



THE HUMAN HEART OF MARTIN 
LUTHER 

There are very few lives indeed of so deep and 
pure an interest as the life of Martin Luther, the 
German peasant, priest, and prince in one. It is 
a life which abides fresh and fruitful to every gen- 
eration, and, as the great ones only are, he is more 
truly a living person after all these years than the 
vast majority of us who are now on the earth. 
" Luther's life," Bunsen says, " is both the epos 
and the tragedy of his age. It is the epos because 
its first part presents a hero and a prophet who 
conquers apparently impregnable difficulties and 
opens a new world to the human mind without any 
power but that of the divine truth and a deep 
conviction, or any authority but that of un- 
daunted and unselfish courage. Luther's life is 
also a tragedy — the tragedy of Germany as well 
as of her son who tried in vain to rescue his country 
from unholy oppression and to regenerate her from 
within by means of the gospel." Such is the judg- 
ment of one of the ablest men in modem Germany 
and no doubt it is true. But I have always felt 
that in the life of this great and good man there 
is a third element we never fairly remember or 

weigh, and that is, it was a human life through 
114 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 115 

and tlirough, human in the sweetest and truest 
sense of that term ; and no estimate of Luther can 
be true, or any portrait or picture, which does not 
give this human element a great and noble place. 
And so I have felt it would be of a real worth to 
us to touch this human heart of the man this 
evening and to speak, not of the hero or the re- 
former, but of the man, Martin Luther, and to see 
what his manhood had to do with the mighty 
movements of his time. 

And I will begin by saying that it was in the 
year those hapless princes were done to death in 
the Tower of London and when Richard Crookback, 
who figures so balefully in English history, made 
his hasty and fatal clutch at the English crown, 
while Columbus was pondering over his problem 
and was still nine years from its solution, and 
when the art of printing was only forty-three 
years old, that Martin Luther was born. It was 
the custom then in Germany for the poor folks in 
country places to flock to the great fairs in the 
fall of the year to sell or barter away what they 
had gathered in the summer, and to procure what 
they must have for the winter in return. It 
seems that Margaret and John Luther had gone 
to Eisleben on this errand, and there the babe 
was bom, and when they went away with their 
babe it was to a home as poor as decent poverty 
could well make it. " My parents were at first 
right poor," he tells us. " My father was a poor 
miner and my mother carried wood on her shoul- 



116 CLEAR GRIT 

ders and in this way they supported us, their 
children. It was hard and bitter work and no one 
has to work so hard now." He says also, " Let 
no one speak with contempt of the poor fellows 
who go from door to door singing and begging for 
bread, for I was once a beggar boy myself, sing- 
ing and seeking for bread at people's doors." 
But it was counted no disgrace to sing a 
song for a crust then in Germany, as it was no 
disgrace to do this forty years ago in England, 
when nothing was more common in the hard times 
than for the poor weavers and spinners out of 
Lancashire to come singing through our little 
towns that lived by farming for their bread, and 
this saved them in our minds and their own also 
from mere tramphood and beggary. 

And it was in one of these rather sad little con- 
certs that a widow saw the child and had com- 
passion on him, took him home — poor little 
fellow — and into her heart and gave him the best 
she had as long as she could keep him. And so 
by one means or another he made his way the best 
he could, for all this was not for mere bread, but 
also for an education on which he had early set 
his heart. He was a fair scholar at six years of 
age and at fourteen was able to enter college 
where he drank greedily at all the wells of learning, 
and beside this was wise enough to get hold of 
some mechanical arts, wood turning among the 
rest, so that if his head should fail he could fall 
back on his hands, and that is a hint young schol- 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 117 

ars now would do well to heed. He found that 
his soul went out also toward music and was skill- 
ful on the flute, and as he grew up was a genuine 
German student, fond of frolic as they all are, 
and with a turn for swaggering about with his 
sword and dagger — one of your young roysterers 
who would not be counted a milksop — and so 
careless withal that he cut his foot one day with 
his dagger and might have died, as one imagines, 
for he was in very great danger ; only we must 
believe that such men as Luther have to live until 
their work is done. 

So the time came when he had to think of a pro- 
fession and was urged to take to the law. But 
Luther never loved either the law or the lawyers 
and he would not be one of them, while his tastes 
led him toward music and the finer arts. He had 
felt no call as yet toward the grand work of his 
life, and you note, as you watch him now, that he 
may become a courtier and scholar, and may only 
live in human memory as a man of genius, wanting 
in the force perhaps which gives perfection to our 
human purpose. He seems bewildered and does 
not quite know what to make of the great seething 
brain and the strong jetting heart, and no more 
suspects than those about him that the question 
he finds so puzzling on the earth is quite settled in 
heaven. 

But when he was about twenty-two, standing 
close to a comrade in a thunderstorm, his com- 
rade was struck dead by the bolt and God was in 



118 CLEAR GRIT 

the thunder. The flames that were to burn up the 
dead brakes which were choking the new promise 
were kindled by that flash of the lightning, and 
the death of the one young man was the life of the 
other. In a great shock of fear and gratitude, 
Luther vowed on the instant he would be a monk, 
because to give yourself to God by wrenching 
yourself from man and to prepare for the world 
to come by backing out of this world was thought 
then to be the holiest thing a man could do. 

In fourteen days from that time Luther took 
the first vows and went into monkery, as such a 
man must now go into anything he feels called 
to do, with a soul all on fire to reach its uttermost 
meaning and exhaust its uttermost duty. He 
used to say long after this that if St. Augustine 
went straight to heaven from a monastery he cer- 
tainly ought to have done so too, if he had died a 
monk. Everything St. Augustine did he did 
and made himself so thoroughly sick with his 
prayers and mortifications and fastings that he 
seemed to be on the point of winning his crown of 
glory before he was twenty-five. When one 
wanted to turn monk in the Middle Ages and told 
his bishop what was in his mind the answer he 
got was, " If you are a man with a manly heart 
there is better work in the world for you than 
the toil of eternally doing nothing " ; and the day 
came when Luther found this was true, for he 
quotes another wise old bishop's saying, that the 
human heart is like a mill-stone, put wheat under 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 119 

it and it will make flour, put nothing under it and 
it will grind on until it is worn away, and " my 
heart," he says, " was like the mill stone in those 
days without the wheat." So the thing kept 
grinding until one morning he did not appear as 
usual at the prayers, and when his brethren broke 
into his cell he seemed to be dying; but with a fine 
wise instinct one of his companions took the flute 
from the table and played one of the airs Luther 
loved so, and then the poor soul came back from 
his flight far away toward the gates of light 
when he heard the melody and took up again the 
burden of monkish misery. 

So that was altogether a terrible time. It was 
needful, I suppose, that he should go through 
with it, because he was the one man in all the 
world who must smite such things as these into 
the dust and he must know the best and the worst 
of the system. Everything useful a monk might 
do he did, and everything dutiful. He was door- 
keeper, and swept the cells, and wound up the 
great clock, and went out begging with a bag on 
his back, and went preaching to the shepherds, 
and said his prayers duly, and chanted his psalms, 
and then he found when all was done that the 
monk was a man still and would never be anything 
else. 

It will not be within the scope of my discourse 
to-night, however, to touch the many reasons 
Luther found in his heart and in the conditions 
of his life for throwing off the monk's hood and 



120 CLEAR GRIT 

setting out afresh to serve God, so I will content 
myself by saying that, it seems to me, all the rea- 
sons which have usually been given for this step 
are inadequate when we fail to take into the ac- 
count his mighty and abounding human nature 
and wonderful human heart. We cannot but be- 
lieve that the doctrine of justification by faith on 
the one hand and of indulgence on the other were 
mighty and momentous forces, the positive and 
negative poles, shall I say, of his grand work. 
But we must take into the account this one thing 
more — that God made Luther a man and then 
the church made him a monk, and then the time 
came when the one confronted the other in a bat- 
tle for his soul and the monk went down. So the 
monk said, " I must starve," but the man said, 
" No, I must eat and drink." The monk said, 
" I must shut my heart and bar it fast and firm 
against women and children," but the man said, 
" No, I must marry and raise a family." The 
monk said, " God is worshiped as though he needed 
something and this eternal round of self-denials 
and crucifixions is the way to win his favor," but 
the man said, " No, this is not the way at all, but 
to serve your fellowmen is to serve God, and to 
love them is to love him." If the monk could have 
slain the man, Luther would never have shaken 
Germany and Christendom out of their long slum- 
ber; but the monk was mortal and the man im- 
mortal, the monk was of the earth earthy, but the 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 121 

man was of the Lord from heaven ; and so it was 
that the man carried the day. 

No estimate of Luther, I say then, can possibly 
be complete which leaves out his grand human 
heart as he takes this great step forward from the 
monk to the man and the full sweet tides of life 
which came to him from the peasant man and 
woman of Saxony. We know this in some way, 
indeed, as we would know the nature of a tree that 
had been planted in a tub and kept in a cellar and 
then taken out and set in the fair sweet sunshine 
of heaven. Let it be an apple and all the proper- 
ties of such a tree are in the pale struggling plant 
which is trying to hold its own in the gloom. Let 
in the earth and the heavens to that plant and it 
will burst out at last into a glorious blossoming, 
and though it may grow gnarled and knotty and 
the worms may eat into it and the rains rot it, 
there shall be unspeakably more to it, when the 
whole tale of its life is told, than if it had stayed 
down there in the dark, pale and puny and spin- 
dling upward always toward the light but never 
finding its fullness and fruition. Luther was such 
a strong sapling set in the gloom of a monastery 
when such places were not at all what they are 
now, I trust, and if he could have been a monk to 
the end of the chapter it would still have been one 
of the grandest chapters in monkish history, be- 
cause he was a preacher in ten thousand even then, 
and so able a man of affairs that even when he had 
to work with half a heart he would do more and 



122 CLEAR GRIT 

better work than those who gave up their whole 
heart to the business. He says of those times: 
" I am eleven monks in one. I am assessor and 
pleader ; I take care of the fish ponds, and interpret 
Paul, and collect the psalms, and make remarks at 
the table, and direct the studies of the younger 
men, and fight the world, the flesh and the devil, 
and need two secretaries to keep up my corre- 
spondence." So he was a man of a mighty power, 
whether you set him in the sunlight or the shadows 
— one of those men who never move but the world 
moves with them, and always ready, when they 
have done their best and failed, to try again. It 
was in those days he was standing in the little 
church at Erfurt with a great crowd about him, 
when all at once the walls of the church gave way 
and that fearful panic-terror struck the people, 
so fatal in such a case. Luther stood steady as 
a pillar of granite stands on the solid earth. He 
arrested the multitude, calmed them down and 
saved them from crushing each other to death, 
and then he made them stay and hear his sermon 
through, because he said it was the devil who 
wanted to hinder the word and he should not by 
any means give in to him and let them lose that 
sermon. 

It was in those days, too, that the plague came, 
taking the heart out of the bravest, who shouted 
as they fled, " Fly, brother, or it will have you 
too." " My God, no," Luther shouted back, " the 
world is not going to perish if a monk dies. I 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 123 

shall stand at my post. I fear death but I expect 
the Lord will deliver me from fear." And so he 
stood fast and God delivered him. So what 
chance there was to be a man while he was only 
a monk Luther seized and held, and as much of a 
man as he could be he was, but then you see when 
he once breaks away what a manhood has smol- 
dered in the cell. 

When he went to Rome he found his brother 
monks there cared little for the rules of their order, 
but would eat and drink on a Friday as heedlessly 
and merrily as on a Saturday, and do many things 
that seemed shameful to the manful and sincere 
German. He gave them a piece of his mind on 
the subject and came near losing his life for his 
temerity. But when he had once cast off the fet- 
ters and become a man, you presently begin to 
notice what I would term the lowest element in his 
fine sturdy manhood, and this was his keen and 
handsome appetite. There was not much he 
could get to eat when he quit the monastery, but 
what there was he enjoyed like a man, or rather, 
one might say, like a great hungry schoolboy 
who has been kept on slim rations at a boarding 
school and then goes home for Christmas. When 
he goes into his deep seclusion at Wartburg to 
save his life, he mentions with a vast enjoyment 
what good things they gave him to eat, but says 
he would not take a mouthful if he thought his 
food was provided at the expense of the good man 
who was warden of the Castle. He feels sure it 



124* CLEAR GRIT 

is the Elector who provides and so he eats and 
drinks with an easy conscience, though by no 
means with an easy digestion, for by and by I 
notice he gets very miserable doing nothing but 
eat and drink, and gets the nightmare for his pains, 
and has the worst attack, as one might expect, 
after he has eaten a great lot of nuts a friend had 
sent him. So I think his confessions seem to point 
fairly to the truth that he takes more of every- 
thing up there in Wartburg than is good for 
him and should have had some wise friend to tell 
him — ignorant as he was — what was the matter, 
and how a man who would fight the world, the flesh 
and the devil, and especially the devil, who, as he 
believed, troubled him so very sore at this time 
that the black splash may still be seen on the wall 
of his cell where the inkstand went he threw at him 
— a man in this case ties one hand to his back, 
as it were, and Luther needed both. Still, you 
cannot but feel that with such light as he had, 
there is a very genuine honesty and downright- 
ness in Luther's love first of all for meat and drink. 
He was in this, indeed, a genuine German, for 
when he made his great answer at Worms, the 
grandest passage in his whole grand life, he found 
a can of beer waiting for him when he went back to 
his lodgings. He was greatly exhausted and so 
presently was the can of beer, for I notice he 
drank it at one draught, and then said, " As the 
man who sent this has thought of me, may God 
one day think of him." I notice too that now and 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 1^5 

then when he finds men complaining of weakness 
of body and darkness of mind, he tells them to 
adopt a more generous diet; he had an idea that 
good eating was one element in good living and a 
good life. So Luther was a man first of all and a 
man with a good appetite, and was what we should 
call a hearty man in this most material but never 
immaterial sense. 

Then he was a hearty and human man in an- 
other sense. When he shook off the monk's hood, 
he shook off as much as he could of his gloom and 
began to believe in having a good time as one of 
the conditions of a good life. And so he used to 
say that one fine safeguard against temptation is 
to turn your thoughts to some pleasant subject. 
He would have those of a gloomy turn indulge in 
a joke if they were able to do so, and go with those 
who were given to laughter, and read bright 
stories, and hear or make cheerful music, because 
he said, " The devil is of a gloomy turn and cheer- 
ful music drives him away." He said to a young 
prince, also, " Innocent gayety and honorable 
courage are the best medicines for young men and 
for old men, too, against gloomy thought, so get 
on horseback and go hunting with your friends 
and join in all the innocent amusements they sug- 
gest to you." He went hunting once himself, but 
I think only once. He caught two hares, he tells 
us, and two little partridges, and then it all came 
over him that this is the way the devil takes to 
catch souls, and that spoiled his sport. He had 



126 CLEAR GRIT 

caught one hare and hidden it in his sleeve and 
when he saw a good chance, set it down hoping 
the poor thing might scud away, but the dogs got 
it after all, and then he said, " I have had enough 
of hunting." 

Luther was a hearty human man in this 
again, that he entered heartily into the life 
about him. But he would have had a sore time 
with some of the brethren now, for he advocated 
going to the theater, and said if we stay away 
from these places because the pieces which are 
acted there often turn upon love, on the 
same principle we must refuse to read the Bible. 
He loved music also, as men with Luther's heart 
always must love it, and said, " Music is one of the 
most delightful presents God has given to man," 
and said also, " Singing is beyond all comparison 
the most delightful exercise of the soul." He 
wondered, too, how secular music could be so rich 
and fine, and spiritual music so poor and cold, and 
said, " If you despise music, I despise you." He 
loved painting also and especially Albert Durer's 
work, as was most natural, and he wrote to a 
friend : " I should like to see your house made 
more beautiful because we need these innocent 
gratifications to keep us from what is worse." 
He loved to see his own books prettily embellished 
also, and many of them in the original editions 
have designs made by his own hand; and JEsop's 
Fables among books was the delight of his life. 
** I have come to my Zion," he writes to Melanc- 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 127 

thon once when he had fled from the enemy, " and 
I mean to raise on it three tabernacles, one to the 
psalmist, one to the prophets, and one to .^Esop " ; 
and he used to say that after the Bible he knew 
of no better books than ^sop's Fables and the 
works of Cato. And so in all these things that 
touch our life in a broad human fashion Luther 
was a hearty human man. 

But beside all this, which can only stand for 
what it is worth after all, there is a quality un- 
speakably greater and more noble in Luther, and 
that is the revelation he has made to us of his 
heart. For it is not hard to find men who love 
good eating and drinking and theaters and music 
and pictures and all things else of this sort, but are 
earthly, sensual and devilish, after all, as men can 
be, because they make these things the mere min- 
isters of their pleasure. Such men are mere 
sybarites. They belong to the order which wears 
purple and fine linen and fares sumptuously every 
day, and then they die and lift up their eyes being 
in torment and can find no fair ground for com- 
plaint. 

But Luther had a great, noble, tender heart, 
which blossomed into infinite beauty when he got 
out of that shadow of the monastery into the light 
of life. And it was most natural that this finest 
revelation of the man, apart from the reformer, 
should open out toward a wife and children, be- 
cause this is one of the loftiest ways, and the 
sweetest and purest, in which a man can prove he 



128 CLEAR GRIT 

has such a heart this side heaven. And so you 
can easily see that in his cell he had watched the 
workings and pondered the problem of a single 
life as well pleasing to God, and is clear in the 
conclusion he draws from it, that the miserable 
celibacy he sees all about him is a dreadful mon- 
strosity of nature, and calls the condition of the 
women in the convents a cursed chastity, pro- 
nounces marriage eminently honorable and divine, 
and says if he had been struck with death before 
he came to the time when he could marry, he would 
have had a pious maiden brought to his bedside 
and married her before he departed out of this life. 
And so when the burden was lifted a little, so 
that he could hold out his hand frankly to a 
woman, he married her, though he was so poor that 
he had to take to his old craft of wood-turning 
to earn his bread, to raise pumpkins also and mel- 
ons in his bit of garden, to pawn his three goblets 
for fifty florins, and says he did think he would 
have to take to mending clocks. He seems to 
have cared nothing for the poverty ; his heart was 
in his home and bloomed out into an infinite grace, 
and in a hundred ways he made the truth clear to 
those who watched him of the deepness and 
strength of the tides which set in forever toward 
this home and the treasures he had gathered there 
for the enriching of his life. And so he used to 
say, " It is no more possible for a man to get along 
well without a good wife than to live without eat- 
ing and drinking ; and to rise betimes in the monj- 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 1^9 

ing and to marry young — these are things a man 
never repents of doing." 

And it was natural again, when God gave him 
children, that he should hold them in his heart and 
his arms — the rough heavy lion-like man — with 
a tenderness surpassing even that of their mother. 
When he came to death's door once, while his chil- 
dren were small, he had them brought to his bed- 
side and sobbed out, " I have nothing to leave you, 
my bairns, but God is the father of orphans and 
widows," and then he went to sleep, but not to 
death. When liis daughter Magdalene was taken, 
it nearly broke his heart; he wept day and night 
and moaned of his love for the child and said he 
could not give her up. But then he had a dream 
and became quiet after that, and when they put 
her in the coffin he had one last great tempest of 
tears. " Poor dear little Madge," he cried, 
" there thou art. Peace be with thee ; thou shalt 
rise again, my child, and shine like a star, and so 
I am joyful in spirit, but oh, so sad also." And 
then he says in a letter, " Have you heard of the 
new birth of my daughter into the kingdom of 
Christ.? We cannot bear our loss yet without 
constant weeping. She is always before us, her 
features and pretty ways come back again and 
she is still with us, my darling, my good daugh- 
ter." 

But once more this tenderness of the father 
and love of the husband could never break down 
the man within the man. When his children were 



130 CLEAR GRIT 

about him and his home was safe, a dear friend, 
Chaplain George, was struck down with the 
plague, something far more frightful, I take it, 
than our smallpox or yellow fever, and they all 
ran away and left him to die. Luther heard of it 
and went at once and brought him to his own 
house and kept him there until he was well ; no 
danger of the plague striking those he loved bet- 
ter than his life could freeze the mighty heart 
and slay the man within the man. He could 
walk through the valley and shadow of death and 
fear no evil. And this was no mere Sunday talk ; 
it was the faith of the heroes and the saints. The 
old deep abiding faith in God those Jewish women 
showed a few years ago in Heidelberg when the 
black fever broke out in a boarding house and 
every blessed Christian there was in the house 
cleared out, but these women who were merely of 
the Old Testament strain quietly turned them- 
selves into nurses and saw the thing through. 

It was most natural again that such a man 
should love nature and drink in her perpetual 
wonder and beauty. So Luther had a marvelous 
liking for the habits and instincts of birds, and 
would break out into ecstasies over a bough 
loaded with ripe cherries. (I always do that 
when I am the guest of the man who owns the 
orchard.) He was hail fellow also with the fishes 
in the pond and the river, and with the roses in a 
garden. He saw a bird one evening nestling 
down on a bough and said to a friend, " See that 



THE HUMAN HEART OF LUTHER 131 

little thing now, how he has chosen his spray 
and is going quietly to sleep. That bird is not 
troubled at all about where he shall rest to-mor- 
row night; he closes his little wings in peace and 
leaves the rest to God." And when he saw two 
birds building in his garden sometime after — • 
Tuesday in this week, for when I was a little mite 
of a child I remember it was settled that the birds 
all picked out their mates on Valentine day — 
Luther said to these birds, " Now, poor things, 
don't fly away. I wish you well with all my 
heart if you would but believe me " ; and it is my 
private opinion that they took him at his word 
and did not fly away. " This thunder is not the 
work of the devil," he said again in a great storm. 
" It is a very bounteous and good thunder. It 
shakes the earth that the fruits may come forth 
and the flowers that bring sweet smells." And 
there is one passage in his letters about the clouds 
and a rainbow far nobler and more beautiful to 
my mind than anything I can find in Ruskin. 

So I have tried to give you a little glimpse in this 
discourse of the personal side of Luther, and the 
substance of manhood from which God's hand and 
his own striving built him up. " When I was in 
Wartburg," Carlyle says, " in company with a 
person of great distinction, and he thought I was 
not watching, he stooped down and kissed the old 
oaken table where Luther had sat at his work, 
and then looked like lightning and rain all the 
morning after, with a visible moisture in those 



13^ CLEAR GRIT 

sunlit eyes of his, and not a word to be drawn 
from him." So might we all kiss that table, 
thinking our thought of Martin Luther. 



SOME OLD UNITARIAN WORTHIES * 

The paper I shall read to you this evening was 
suggested by a visit to a fine old library in Lon- 
don, founded by one of the worthies of our faith 
and a forefather, Dr. Williams, and endowed with 
some of the wealth which came to him through 
his marriage to two rich wives. The library was 
opened in 1729, contains now about 40,000 vol- 
umes and among these a Bible done with white 
ink on black paper for an old London mer- 
chant who was going blind, and another in short- 
hand done by a man more than two centuries ago 
who feared that the last of the Stuarts, then on 
the throne, was bent on burning all the Bibles 
printed in the English tongue that he might re- 
establish the Church of Rome. There is a great 
store of manuscripts also, which belong to the day- 
dawn of our faith in the motherland, and among 
them many from the hand of Richard Baxter who 
was on the Commission authorized to draw up the 
terms for the Westminster Confession and who, 
when his paper was read and they said to him, 
" But if we adopt these terms we shall have to let 
in the Socinians," answered, " Then so much the 

* Read before the Unitarian Club of New York. 
133 



134 CLEAR GRIT 

better, gentlemen, and so much the fitter " ; and the 
paper was rejected. 

You find there also many portraits of the great 
and good men of the Puritan Reformation — 
Flavel, Baxter, Howe, Watts, Milton, and many 
more whose names are growing dim now in the 
mists of time. These portraits from the life are 
replete with a living interest to us for many rea- 
sons. But this is what touches you especially as 
you glance at those who were nearest of kin to us 
in the old Presbyterian faith and order from 
which our churches sprang. There is a light in 
the eyes and a winsome look on the face which 
suggests the thought that their faith in God and 
man has been growing sweeter and more whole- 
some in their hearts, and are men after the pat- 
tern of pious and prayerful Mr. Perkins, of whom 
Fuller says that " in the earlier years of his min- 
istry he would pronounce the word damn so that 
it left an echo in your ears for a good while after, 
and so expounded the ten commandments that 
your heart sank down and your hair stood up to 
hear him, but he became much milder as he grew 
older " and said his damn with a difference. They 
are the portraits of men who have been walking 
more and more in the sunshine and less in the 
shadows of their time and are exchanging the 
fetters of the spirit for the budding forth of 
wings, or, as Lowell says, "beginning to twist the 
tough old iron of Calvin into love knots." They 
seem to be well men and well-favored men, whose 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 135 

faith appears to agree with them much better 
than the faith of many all about them, and to be 
indeed in fair measure the bread of life and the 
water or the wine. 

I have thought of this again in glancing at the 
portraits of our own good divines in Salem and 
Boston and otherwheres in New England. There 
you may notice this change from the shadows 
toward the sunshine in the men who hold some 
gleams of radiance in the heart of them which can 
not be slain even by the deplorable portraiture 
of their day and generation. For as it was over 
in the motherland so it was over here. It was a 
long time by our human reckoning before the 
dawning light in their eyes and the more winsome 
look on the faces of these men found its way 
fairly into their Sunday sermons and their week- 
day speech and life, while for this, as it seems to 
me, there was good reason in men of their make 
and mold. The old Puritan manhood had done 
a mighty stroke of work after all on its black 
bread and waters of Marah, and there was plenty 
of iron and lime in these, or had been. Why, 
then, should they be in haste to change the well 
proven diet for another which might be the mother 
milk of all enervation to them and their people? 
The terms of their faith had been settled by the 
saints and seers who had subdued kingdoms and 
wrought righteousness, and their Saint John of 
Geneva had plowed those deep lines to the right 
and the left of God's eternal love. How then or 



136 CLEAR GRIT 

why should they overpass these lines or try to 
blot them out? 

But as it was well said of the good Bishop 
Berkeley that " he proved by pure logic what no 
man in his right mind could believe," so this was 
what befell the fathers of our faith in New Eng- 
land. The time came when the things they had 
held for the truth of God against all comers could 
be held no longer in their grim integrity. It was 
not sun-up but the day was breaking, and then 
they could not preach the old doctrines as men 
like Edwards preached them, with such a deep 
conviction that once on a time his hearers clutched 
the pillars of the meeting house in solid affright 
lest their feet should slide down swift into hell. 
Notes of interrogation, as I think of them, would 
lurk in their eyes or gleam through their spec- 
tacles when they cited some dogma dedicated to 
despair, as Bacon says, and a pause would follow 
more eloquent than their speech, but that would 
be all they didn't say. Then on some happy Sun- 
day there would be a sermon tender to tears, when 
the shadows would be to the light only as those 
you see sweep over the meadow grass and grain 
in the summer time, to be taken back perhaps in 
part on the next Sunday, and then another which 
would not be taken back, and then there would be 
an answering light in the eyes and on the faces of 
those in the pews who were waiting for the bugle 
to sound the morning's march away from the old 
dark dogmas, and forever. 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 137 

I know their story because in some poor fashion 
it is my own. How they would try their wings 
in little flights toward the sweeter and clearer 
heavens and then settle down again in the old nest, 
strike a brighter note now and then, but return 
again to the minors and the thirds, and so sing 
their " psalm of degrees." Still there they were 
faithful to the light that shone for them as men 
who saw as in a glass, dimly as yet, the glory of 
the Lord and were changed into the same image 
from glory to glory in the ever growing light of 
the new morning. 

So I have loved these many years to read the 
records of their lives which remain to us and have 
thought I might say some word about them which 
would stir up our minds by way of remembrance, 
and help us to see how well they are worth re- 
membering — these men of the old tenor in the 
churches of New England — this by a broad 
glance at them in general, then in particular to 
say a word about some who dwell always in my 
heart. 

And in the broader glance, to notice first what 
stalwart men they were as a rule, and what a stay- 
ing power lay in them to hold on where they be- 
gan and to grow better with the years to the hearts 
and minds of those who loved them, like those fine 
old wines one hears of — ministers and men who 
were by no means of the mind of Dr. Bethune, 
once of our city, who said that short pastorates 
were a merciful interposition of Providence on be- 



138 CLEAR GRIT 

half of the churches and that five years is about 
as long as a minister ought to stay for his own 
sake as for theirs. So I notice in the account of 
those who are counted among the forefathers be- 
tween 1717 and the times of the Revolution, there 
is one whose ministry to the same church and peo- 
ple spanned the space of seventy years within 
three months from the time when he preached his 
first sermon. And there are three of sixty years 
or over, seven from fifty to fifty-six, and quite a 
lot from thirty-five up toward fifty, every man of 
them dying where he had lived so long and done 
his day's work for his church and town. Church 
and town I say, for you have to notice also how 
this strong life of the minister blended with the 
life all about him and was by no means like the 
great Rubens at Antwerp, only to be shown at 
High Mass on Sundays and the holy days. Their 
life mingled well with the week-day uses, which 
stood then as they do now at six to one. 

And so while the traditions make this man of 
the old tenor a good deal of an autocrat, the most 
of these men were democrats also in the marrow 
of their bones, because they were of the people 
and from the people, with a man's red blood puls- 
ing through their hearts, and had a man's work 
to do where they stood in their lot to the end of 
the days. So my minister of the old tenor man- 
aged his glebe, or taught his school, or both, when 
he must. And you could not laugh at his farm- 
ing or his teaching. Went to town meeting, that 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 139 

golden heart in the grain of our self-government, 
and spoke liis mind as a man in the home-made 
Congress. Took his time fast days and Thanks- 
giving, especially, to speak on the burning ques- 
tions that were forever aglow in the radical and 
restless (?ommonwealth, and quit himself like a man 
in these things as surely as in what they called the 
deep things of God. Preached his good old ser- 
mons to new texts perhaps, now and then, when he 
was on the home stretch, while the people said 
" the old man grows better and better," or else 
was the fellow in this of good old Father Richard- 
son of Hingham, who told me that when he had 
been preaching forty years and felt he had not 
another word to say and must quit, he toted every 
blessed sermon — two thousand or more ■ — into 
his yard and burnt them up. Then he said when 
the old brakes were burnt, the new grass began 
to spring and he held on for some years more with 
great satisfaction. He was blind when he told 
me that good story. Then my grand old man of 
the New England brand closed his eyes, when the 
long day's work was done, in the faith of fine old 
Doctor Strong who said, " Death to me is only like 
going into the next room where the most of my 
friends have gone already, far more than are here," 
and was borne to his rest while the little Israel 
mourned for him as for a dear father many days. 
So runs the story of these men of the long and 
strong ministry, who were by no means the idols 
we imagine to be kept in a shrine. They were not 



140 CLEAR GRIT 

seldom of those who did their share to raise finer 
grass and grain, and better apples in the or- 
chards from which they made good sound cider. 
They also said, " I go a-fishing," if they lived by 
the sea and knew how to handle a boat. Said they 
were strangers and sojourners on the earth, but, 
as Mather says of the great lady, " took New 
England on the way to heaven," and held on to 
this world with a strong grip to the end of their 
tether, not quite so ready to go as glad to stay 
while they could be of any use. 

They were men who liked to have their own 
way also, as strong men do, and would be apt to 
get it as the reverend ancestor of the Appletons 
did. He wanted a very noble woman for his wife 
— and small blame to him — but another young 
divine wanted her also. And so, noticing his ri- 
val's horse was tied to the fence as he rode toward 
the house one day, he loosed the creature, gave him 
a sly stroke with his whip, went in and said to his 
innocent rival, " Your horse is running away, sir, 
as hard as he can scour." So he must needs run 
after it, and lo, when he came back with the horse, 
the rogue had won the maiden. 

Shall I tell you of Cutler, in this swift glance, 
who printed a pamphlet in 1787 in which he said 
many then living would see our great Western 
waters navigated by steam, and in fifty years 
there would be more people in the Northwest than 
in all New England? And Ely, of the serpent's 
wisdom, who in a fevered time was charged with 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES IM 

preaching politics ? But it was found he had only 
prayed politics, when his accusers were brought 
to book, while this was the sentence in his prayer 
which made the trouble: "Though hand join in 
hand, yet the wicked shall not go unpunished." 
Or a man of such girth that no doctrinal tape line 
could measure him, like Osgood of Medford, who, 
when he went abroad on an exchange, was charged 
in one town with leaning too far toward Arminian- 
ism and in another town of leaning too far to- 
ward Calvinism, but it was the same sermon he 
preached word for word? So you will see how 
much of our preaching lies in 3^our hearing. 
Men again who were able to find the right weapon 
for their purpose, like Dr. Burnet. He came to 
us from the Presbyterian fold, and had a very 
sore time of it for some years, but found he must 
go, and on his farewell Sunday gave out the 
lines : — 

" Hard lot is mine, my days are cast 
Among the sons of strife, 
Wliose never ceasing quarrels waste 
My golden hours of life." 

And they sang them. " Good reason may be ap- 
pareled in the garb of wit," Barrow says, 
and may pass then where else it might never 
arrive; and when the brethren labored with Dr. 
South for the salted sprinklings of wit he would 
have in speech and sermon, he said, " The truth 
is, I cannot help it, brethren, and if God Almighty 



14^ CLEAR GRIT 

had been pleased to endow you with wit, what 
would yow do? " 

So you begin to see gleams of humor in the eyes 
of these men and hear ripples of laughter at some 
stroke of wit, as they are aware of the incoming 
light. Dr. Hitchcock was one of these men who 
sprinkled his speech with the attic salt and when 
a rather stupid brother in a company remarked 
that he might say just as good things as Brother 
Hitchcock was saying but they would pass un- 
noticed, the Doctor only answered, " Try." 
And when Dr. Chauncy said he had prayed that 
God would never make him an orator, a brother 
remarked, " Then I know of one prayer which has 
most surely been answered." Then there was Dr. 
West, who kept one little jokelet for his weddings. 
His wife's name was Experience. She was very 
tall, and so the Doctor would say, " A good wife 
is a great blessing to a man. I know that from 
my long Experience." Dr. West looms up large. 
He also was a man of vision, was especially strong 
in the prophecies and said in 1777, starting from 
Ezekiel and Daniel, " From these I understand 
that the Russians are to conquer the Turks, but 
before that the Greeks and many other subjects 
of the Turkish empire will fight themselves free." 

This is the way they impress you — these fore- 
elders of our faith and life in the time — as strong 
men who stood square on their feet and were just 
about as good for week-day use as for Sundays. 
They were unique men, and units with but very few 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 143 

ciphers, and men who made the promise good in 
the blended church and parish, " thou shalt be the 
head and not the tail," — men of our mankind and, 
all the more for that reason, men of God. They 
could commune with the smith . in his forge, the 
farmer at his plow, with the Most High and his 
Christ, and the saints and angels. And while they 
sprang from a faith of severe and stern limita- 
tions, this was as the stones are in the foundations 
of some grand structure and from these they 
builded upward through faith in the living God. 
I said we would glance at some men, especially, 
who dwell always in my heart, and I must begin 
with the white patriarch whose ministry to the 
First Church in Hingham spanned three score and 
nine years and nine months, Ebenezer Gay, who 
was bom in 1696 and died in 1787. That fine 
old man who burnt all his old sermons was settled 
over the same church in 1806. I am not sure 
that Dr. Gay baptized him, but he may easily 
have done this, and I like to believe it was so. 
Well, Dr. Gay was running about in Dedham, 
where a woman lived who was running about her 
home in England, a child of seven they say, when 
the Mayflower came over and was a mother of chil- 
dren when Marston Moor was fought, so that 
since my hair was gray I have touched the hand 
of a man on whose head Dr. Gay's hand may well 
have been laid for benediction, and on his head 
the hand of the old saint who was living when 
Shakespeare died. Dr. Gay died 107 years ago 



144 CLEAR GRIT 

the 8th day of this March. It was a Sunday morn- 
ing and he was preparing for the services in the 
church, which is still standing — the oldest 
church building in North America, as is most fit- 
ting — and before he could have been through 
with the services he had gone to his rest. And 
I find no trace of the complaint of the Psalmist 
that if men live to four score years, yet is their 
strength, labor and sorrow, for when the true time 
had come, he preached his famous sermon, " I am 
this day four score and five years old," a bright 
and sunny sermon, in which he says, " You have 
not been given to change, nor with itching ears 
have you heaped to yourselves teachers, while you 
have been only kind to me, for of injuries I re- 
member none, while I have reaped your carnal 
things to my comfortable subsistence," which I 
noticed, when I Avas mousing through their church 
books once, usually included four barrels each 
year of that good sound cider. Dr. Sprague 
counts him as the first forefather of our faith in 
New England, but his forefathering lay mainly 
in this, that he would be a free man of God in his 
ministry and said in an ordination sermon, " It is 
a pity that any man at his entrance into the min- 
istry should get a snare to his soul by subscribing 
to or engaging to preach by any rule of faith, 
creed or confession, which is merely of human pre- 
scription and imposition." He had one trouble 
through which he found his way by gentleness; 
he did not ring quite true when the bells struck 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 145 

for the Revolution; so they thought and so, no 
doubt, it was. They did not know quite where 
to find him, but he knew where to find them, for 
when the great Thanksgiving drew near in one of 
the dismal years and the house-mothers thereaway 
were at their wits' end for raisins and currants, a 
storm blew some English vessels on the coast laden 
with these dainties, which were captured and 
brought to Boston. And then in his Thanksgiv- 
ing prayer he said, " Oh, Lord, who rulest the 
winds and the waves, we thank thee for the gra- 
cious interposition of thy Providence in wafting 
to our shores so many rich bounties to make glad 
the dwellings of thy people," of which prayer 
Sam Adams said, " Well, that is trimming with 
the Almighty." And I see that gleam of humor 
about his mouth and in his eyes, for when he 
wanted a well in his dooryard and had told them 
he must have one and even mentioned it by clear 
inference in his prayers, still they put him off 
with promises, until on a Sunday he preaches 
from the text, " Then Israel sang, spring up, O 
well. See ye unto it," and got his well. When 
brother Joseph Green was ordained and he must 
bless him, he said, " The Lord make Joseph a 
fruitful bough by a well, grafted into the tree of 
life and always green.'* And when he must 
preach at the installation of Ezra Carpenter away 
up in Keene, his text was, " I lift up mine eyes 
and look and behold a man with a measuring line 
in his hand." 



14?6 CLEAR GRIT 

He was missing his hay once and set his own 
watch with a dark lantern. Then when the rogue 
came out with all he could carry on his back, 
stole behind him, whipped out the candle and set 
it afire. The man ran away from his burden 
in great terror. The doctor kept his secret, say- 
ing no word even to his own family. The poor 
fellow came to confession and told him how he had 
stolen the hay but God had sent fire from heaven 
and set it blazing on his back. So he was for- 
given, but he must never steal any more hay. 

" Above all the men I remember in sixty years," 
John Adams said, " Dr. Gay was a Unitarian." 
His good wife, who was of the line of Governor 
Bradford, bore him five sons and six daughters, 
exactly to my mind the right proportion, and 
there he stands to me now with the dawning light 
on his good old face, the first of the fore-elders 
we know of in New England. 

Another man, but of sterner stuff, was Dr. 
Jonathan Mayhew, raised on Martha's Vine- 
yard from a root of grace running to the good 
fruit of the ministry which had been growing 
there eighty years in the fine old orthodox gar- 
den; but when the slip came to the bearing, 
and they looked that it should bring forth 
grapes in our Zion on the Bay, it brought forth 
wild grapes to their thinking. Mayhew was 
the Theodore Parker in the ministry of his time 
in Boston — and does not look unlike him if he 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 147 

would take off his wig — the first Unitarian, Dr. 
Freeman tells us, who said so out in meeting, and 
a man who would say things when he was so 
minded that jarred the dozing churches like the 
shock of an earthquake. One of the men who 
came not to bring peace, but a sword, and of a 
delicate make and mold. Yet no other man could 
bend his bow, while so keen and far flying were 
his arrows that some of them struck the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury in his palace, and Dr. John- 
son in his den, and so roused their wrath that they 
must needs shoot back in printed screeds that were 
meant to settle his business, but it was not set- 
tled. They came down on him here, but it was the 
same story — said he preached too much on 
politics. His answer was to preach more. Many 
called the King, Charles I, even in Boston, " that 
blessed martyr," and kept the day holy when, as 
the elder Boswell said, " we garred kings ken 
that they had a joint in their neck." Mayhew 
took the day to prove that the " blessed martyr " 
was an unblessed tyrant, false to his friends, to 
his oath, and to the constitution, and the true 
king was Cromwell. 

He was in the heart of the movement which re- 
sulted in the Revolution, and gave birth to the 
winged idea that the strength of the Colonies 
must lie in their federation for resistance and vic- 
tory. The thought came to him as he woke out 
of his sleep, he says, on a Sunday morning: It 



148 CLEAR GRIT 

is the germ of the United States of America. 
John Adams calls him one of the master spirits 
of his day as an eminent patriot and a liberal 
divine. They heard about him all the way to 
Aberdeen in Scotland and sent him the degree of 
Doctor in Divinity, while over here they had 
only done this, as Parker said of himself, " with 
two small d's and a hyphen." He stood out 
against the Stamp Act and was the one man in 
the pulpits down there whose words told like a 
park of artillery. " We have sixty thousand 
fighting men," he said, when things were grow- 
ing desperate, " let England beware what she 
is doing." He could not approve of the Boston 
riot, but when the governor ordered the arrest of 
the rioters he said, " What's the use, the prisons 
cannot hold them," and the next Sunday preached 
from the text, " Brethren, I would that they were 
cut off that trouble you, for ye have been called unto 
liberty." I said the great thought of the federa- 
tion of the Colonies came to him on a Sunday 
morning. It was his last Sunday in the pulpit 
of his good West Church. Death came with a 
swift rush on him through a cold caught when he 
was about the Master's business, in his full prime 
of forty-six. " He died of overwork," Bancroft 
says, " in the unblemished beauty of his man- 
hood, consumed by his fiery zeal, and whoever 
would tell the true story of the Revolution must 
reckon with John Mayhew." He was a burning 
and a shining light, one of the 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 149 

" Old heroes who could grandly do, 
As they could greatly dare. 
A vesture very glorious, 
Their shining spirits wear. 
God give us grace 
That we may see them face to face. 
In the great day which comes apace." 

Then there is Dr. James Freeman, of King's 
Chapel in Boston, who says, " Dr. Mayhew was 
the first of our fore-elders who got fairly out of 
the woods," while it is usually believed that Free- 
man was the first. He drew his own portrait in 
his old age for a young man who plumed himself 
on always saying what he thought, " There is no 
need to say all you think, for if some one was 
introduced to me and should say, * Dr. Freeman, 
what a little old spindle-shanked gentleman you 
are,' that no doubt would be in his mind, but 
he need not say it." He was settled over King's 
Chapel in 178^ (it was then within the Epis- 
copal fold) but found he could not use the prayer 
book as it stood and proposed to resign. He 
objected to the Athanasian creed, for instance. 
Someone asked Dr. Fisher how he could use that 
creed when he did not believe it and he answered, 
" Well, I read it as if I didn't believe it." And 
when Brother Pyle was ordered to read it by his 
Bishop under the threat of pains and penalties, 
he prefaced the reading by the remark, " This 
is said to be the creed of St. Athanasius, but God 



150 CLEAR GRIT 

forbid that it should be yours or mine." Dr. 
Freeman could not run round the haystack in any 
such fashion. His word must be Yea and Amen 
or it was no use. So he would throw up his 
hands. But they said, " No, you must alter the 
prayer book to suit yourself." Someone asked 
Dr. Bellows once if the King's Chapel prayer 
book was not the dear old English Liturgy wa- 
tered. " No," he answered with that flashing wit 
in which he was such a master, " washed.'* He 
was the second to take the brand and speak out in 
meeting so that there could be no doubt where 
he stood and what he stood for, and his people 
followed him in heart and vote. But they did 
not steal the meeting-house or try to, for they 
said to the handful who must leave, " We will 
buy you out," and this they did in full quittance. 
But true to his faith, he disliked bigotry, ortho- 
dox or Unitarian no matter, and used to say " the 
cant of liberality is the worst cant I know of. 
My neighbor entertains me of an evening by 
abusing the orthodox and boasts all the time over 
his own liberality." 

Dr. Freeman for forty years always finished 
his sermon on Fi"iday evening and took Saturday 
for recreation. I would that his mantle had 
fallen on one man I know. His grandson in the 
spirit drew his portrait for me once as he saw 
him sitting in his beautiful old age or walking 
in the garden waiting for the angel of release. So 
he stays with me as he looked to our dear friend, 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 151 

and I hear him say with a smile on his sweet old 
face, " I am growing very thin you see. Some 
people use handkerchiefs to wipe away the tears 
they do not shed. I wear clothes to hide the 
limbs I do not possess." 

The last man we have the time for is Dr. Rip- 
ley, minister of the church at Concord for sixty- 
two years, so frail when he was called that one 
vote was cast against him on the ground that he 
would soon die on their hands and they would have 
to hunt up another man. But he was called, 
and at the end of fifty years he said he must have 
a colleague — he was no longer able to do the 
work as it should be done. They called a meeting 
to see about it and pass the vote. One vote was 
cast " agin " the proposition. It was cast by 
the selfsame man, who insisted that the Doctor 
was hale and strong yet, so what was the good of 
a colleague. You will find his portrait in your 
Emerson. Turn it up to save time and short- 
coming. He was one of the old line who fought 
shy of 

" Much wrangling in things needless to be known," 

a good man in the pulpit, the parish and the old 
manse, and especially good at fire, rushing forth 
when the fire bell rang with his fire bucket and his 
bag. 

He was also one of the grand old line who, 
when they prayed, expected an answer and meant 
to have it. The master tells how he was helping 



152 CLEAR GRIT 

with the hay once when a thunder gust came up, 
and how he made the rake travel, saying, " We are 
in the Lord's hand," in a way which seemed to 
mean. You know me; this field is mine. Dr. Rip- 
ley's. And of a time when someone must pray 
for rain — everything was burning in the fervent 
heat ! This the colleague was preparing to do, 
but " No," the old man seemed to say, '' this is 
no time for you young Cambridge tyros ; I must 
see to it myself." And now I must tell the tale 
as it was told to me by a man still living, honored 
of us all, who knew him and loved him. He was 
a boy then and was there in the old meeting house 
to hear that prayer. It was the afternoon service 
and the young man was ready standing in his 
place. But the old veteran rose and waived him 
back, took his place and — well now, I do wish 
the dear old judge was here to tell the story — 
but the prayer was somewhat in this wise. " Oh 
thou that rulest in the heavens and on the earth 
and maketh the clouds thy chariots, we want rain 
here in Concord. The grass is burning up in 
the meadows, the pastures are bare, the com is 
withering; the dumb creatures are thine; they 
are ready to die; and we are fainting in the 
draught. Open thou the windows of heaven and 
send down the rain." So the old man went on 
as if the prayer was also a command. It was 
a demand beyond all question by the time he 
got through. The old man had lost himself in 
the mighty throb of a heart fixed on God. The 



SOME UNITARIAN WORTHIES 153 

people were dismissed, looking toward each other 
in wonder. What answer would come to the cry 
of their Elijah in this sore stress? When the 
church was sealed and they stood ready to go home 
a cloud was gathering right over Concord, and 
before they got home who had far to go the rain 
was pouring down on them, but on the region 
round about there was no rain that day. Dr. Rip- 
ley had only prayed for Concord. Do I believe 
it.? Yes, I do, because my old friend said so. 
He is the very soul of truth and he was right 
there. 

This, so far as I can tell it now, is the story 
of some old Unitarian worthies, the heralds of 
the new day. I have touched it because I love 
to read the records of their life and work. They 
were men who answered in their time to the dawn 
and the dayspring from on high, forerunners of 
the nobler and fairer faith in God and man. Let 
their names be held in honor by us and their 
memory be fragrant. We reap from their sow- 
ing as others will reap from ours, while we can 
sing as they could not, 

" Surely the day is on our side, 
And heaven, and the sacred sun, 
Surely the stars, and the bright 
Immortal inscrutable night. 
Yea the darkness, because of the light, 
Is no darkness at all, but blooms as a bower side 
When the winter is over and done." 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 

Theue is a small place called Catterick in my 
native County of York in England, where the 
Romans built a fortress, and held it almost to 
the close of their stay in the kingdom, and where 
Paulinus came to preach and baptize in the year 
627, — the first missionary sent from Rome to 
the rude tribes in the Yorkshire dales. He won 
the queen of Edwin, our king, to the faith, and she 
won Edwin after some trouble and delay, and then 
he ordered his subjects to follow him, and be 
baptized in the small bright river close at hand. 
The people and the high priest of the old re- 
ligion hurled down the great idol at a place not 
far away, because, as he said, the old gods had 
left him poor after many years of good service, 
and he was quite ready to try the new. 

Edwin built a church, also, within the old 
Roman station, as we guess, and a man was made 
vicar of this church eleven hundred and thirty-six 
years after the advent of Paulinus and the conver- 
sion of the tribe, such as it was, the story of whose 
life I want to touch this morning. This was The- 
ophilus Lindsey, a fast friend of Franklin, and of 
our Republic, new bom then and passing through 
her darkest days. 

His mother was a cousin to these Marlbor- 
154 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 155 

oughs we know of here in New York. She lived 
in the family of the Huntingdons, earls of degree, 
and of whom Selina, the countess of Hunting- 
don, was the fast friend of Wesley and Whitfield, 
and a woman of such sterling worth that it is 
reported when Chesterfield heard some persons of 
quality sneering at her for her piety, he said he 
should like to take his chance at getting into 
heaven, holding on her gown. Mr. Lindsey's 
father was a Scotchman, and married his wife for 
pure love of her, I trust; but it was a great alli- 
ance for the canny Scot into the bargain, and it 
is clear he knew as well what he was about in this 
respect, as any man of his nation who ever crossed 
the border. And so little Master Lindsey w^as 
named Theophilus in honor of a lord of that name 
among the Huntingdons, and perhaps, for the 
further reason, which prompts you to name your 
son Theophilus when you have a relative of that 
name who has oceans of money and power. Be- 
cause if you can get those noble people to stand 
sponsor to your son over there in England, if you 
design him for the church, and they have rich 
livings in their gift, — as these Huntingdons had, 
— you may go to sleep with the restful feeling 
of a man who so far has done his whole duty. 
Then there were the Hastings, also, with whom 
the newly-wedded wife was intimate, two maiden 
ladies with plenty of money, and very warm 
hearts ; and they took charge of the boy's educa- 
tion, sent him to a good grammar school, thence 



156 CLEAR GRIT 

to St. John's College in Cambridge, and kept their 
eye on him to such good purpose, that when a 
great bishop wanted a tutor for his son, they got 
him the place, and added another string to his 
bow, so that if the Huntingdons had no living 
ready, when the young man was ready to take 
orders, the bishop would be sure to have one, and 
then he would be provided for beyond all ques- 
tion for the rest of his life. So when he was 
ordained, there was a living ready for him in Lon- 
don, by the grace of Lady Anne Hastings, one of 
the good maiden sisters. Then the Huntingdons 
took hold and gave him a lift also. 

The Duke of Somerset wanted a chaplain, and 
needed one. They got Lindsey the post, and 
then in no long time, the Duke died in his chap- 
lain's arms. His grandson was the Duke of 
Northumberland, a boy of nine, in very delicate 
health. He went abroad with this lad and trav- 
eled with him a couple of years, and when they 
came home, he was presented to a living of very 
great value. For you must understand that these 
livings are just as much the property of those who 
have the good fortune to own them, as a horse is, 
or a ten acre lot. They can give them to whom 
they will, or sell them to the highest bidder, sub- 
ject to the life of the incumbent in possession; 
so that within my memory, you could read scores 
of advertisements like this ; " To be sold, a liv- 
ing worth so many hundred pounds a year, in a 
pleasant neighborhood, age of the present incum- 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 157 

bent, say 85." You buy such a living, enter on 
it at the old man's death, turn his old wife and 
daughters out on the world — and that is the 
state church of England. 

Well, Lindsey was just warming his new nest 
when the Huntingdons took hold again, and pre- 
sented him with a much richer living in the west 
of England, so he went there and began again. 
Then my Lord Duke of Northumberland took 
a turn at him once more. He was to go to Ire- 
land as viceroy of that hapless kingdom, wanted 
young Lindsey to go with him, and it was on the 
cards that he should be presently made a bishop; 
but here the man made a stand against this per- 
petual downpour of good fortune. 

He would not go to Ireland; he was well con- 
tent to be vicar of a rich parish in Dorset; he 
would have no more promotion, he had got enough. 

And well you may be content to be vicar of a 
good parish in a pleasant English county. 

First of all, your parsonage is apt to be a 
perfect wonder of comfort and convenience. It 
fronts south as a rule, and is backed by an or- 
chard and a garden. The old walls of the garden 
are covered with cherries, plums, and apricots, 
and in the south they even try to grow peaches; 
getting with infinite pains about the sort of peach 
we see here in early June, and avoid as we avoid 
the plague. But with this very slight drawback 
touching the peach, and the grape let us say, I 
know of no spot under the sun more exquisite than 



158 CLEAR GRIT 

your old English vicarage and its garden. In 
the garden you are sure to find all the old fruits 
and flowers, and the fruit is as safe as if it was 
in Eden, for I never heard of the boy who could 
even imagine a raid on the vicar's fruit; while 
you have to guess at the age of the vicar's house, 
covered as it is with vines and roses, trained about 
the ancient muUioned windows, or invaded by 
honeysuckle and sweetbriar when you open the 
casement, that has to be braided gently back 
when you close it, as a maiden braids back her 
hair. Then your vicar's income also, is, or was, 
as safe as the Bank of England. It had known 
nothing since the days of Queen Anne of hard 
times, or panics, or revolutions. The king may 
lose his throne and become a beggar with the 
Stuarts, but your vicar sits in his chair and draws 
his income with a quiet regularity, which sets the 
seasons themselves, one would think, on edge with 
envy, so steadily comes the day when your money 
is paid down on the nail. We trace the vicars 
of the church where I was baptized in 1824. 
The man who baptized me was fifty-two years 
vicar, and I doubt whether a poorer preacher ever 
stood in the old oaken pulpit, but that made no 
matter ; keeping the church between yourself and 
what might befall you when you got through, was 
the main matter, and then the parson might hunt, 
or shoot, or fish to his heart's content, and no 
man say him nay. 

Well, Mr. Lindsey was now the vicar of one 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 159 

of these fine old parishes, and if he had been con- 
tent to be this and no more, I should not care 
to touch the story of his life, but he was not 
content. It came out in no long time that the 
man had struck a great trouble. 

He had found somehow that while these people 
had given him the livings, each better than the 
other, God had also given him a conscience, and 
a certain solemn insight of this human life of 
ours, which would not let him rest. Everything 
in the world had been done for him, but this was 
not enough; he found now that he must do some- 
thing for himself, and for the Most High; so 
this undid all the doing of the Huntingdons, the 
Somersets, the Hastings, and the Northumber- 
lands, who had stood to him up to this time in 
God's stead. 

The first sign he made that he was not to be 
one of the old easy-going sort, was a move to ex- 
change his living in the pleasant southwest, for 
one in the bleak and barren north, this eleven hun- 
dred years old church at Catterick. 

It was a hard place with a much poorer in- 
come, but a man was wanted there who would 
be a second Bernard Gilpin, and put his whole 
soul into the work of winning the people from 
something like paganism to God, and as it turned 
out he was the man. 

Then there was another reason. He had read 
that word of Paul, I Corinthians VIII and 6th 
verse, " there is but one God the Father." This 



160 CLEAR GRIT 

word had sunk into his heart, and haunted him so 
that he had to ponder its meaning, and try to find 
for his own soul's sake the truth of the Trinity 
or the Unity of God. There in the north, also, 
he had heard of men who would talk with him 
frankly on these high matters. He was of too 
great a heart to do as thousands do now, who, 
not believing one word about a Trinity of deities, 
keep this all to themselves and make as if they 
believed it, all for reasons I will not venture to 
explore. 

He was not clear yet about this truth of the 
Unity of God. He was only seeking for light, 
but meanwhile, as he was now Vicar of Catterick, 
he went bravely to work to do his best, and did 
it grandly. He fed the hungry, and clothed the 
naked, started ever so many schools, and helped 
to maintain them out of his diminished income. 
He was a sort of rough and ready doctor, also, car- 
rying such simple medicines as he could prescribe 
along with his Bible and praj^er book. Living with 
his brave good wife on a very small part of his 
income, giving away all the rest, and never sav- 
ing a sixpence, he was in a word what thou- 
sands of " good parsones of a towne " have always 
been in England. Still the good parson felt this 
was not all he must be and do. These thoughts 
would still haunt him of the Trinity, and whether 
it was a truth taught in the Bible or a dogma of 
the church. 

He was a man of excellent learning, and the 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 161 

most absolute sincerity. He would play no tricks 
with his soul for the sake of his living. His 
friends, almost to a man, were in the old mother 
church; his social position was lost if he left it. 
The Hastings, Huntingdons, and Northumber- 
lands would all go back on him if he became a 
Unitarian, but if he stuck to the church, they 
would help him on again, if he did but give them 
a sign ; and he still might no doubt be a bishop, 
if he would only hold his tongue, and strike for 
a bishopric. He had a friend high in the church, 
who thought just as he did, when they talked 
these things over, but this man gave no sign of 
distress when he had to read the Trinitarian for- 
mulas in the prayer book. 

There was no such easy-going way open to my 
good vicar. He said when he was through with the 
fight, and had come out square for the truth. " It 
appeared to me at last to be a real duplicity, that 
while I knew I was praying in my heart to the 
one God the Father, my people were led by the 
language I used, to address themselves to two 
other persons ; and as one great design of Christ's 
mission, was to promote the worship of the Father, 
as he himself tells us, I could not think it right 
to do what I was doing, for the simple-minded 
people who worshiped God with me." Then he 
had a severe fit of sickness, which brought him 
face to face with death, and demanded whether he 
could face the eternal world in this mask he was 
wearing, while as he was getting well he happened 



162 CLEAR GRIT 

on an old book, written by a man who had given 
up his Hving a hundred years before for the sake 
of his conscience, and the man said these words 
to him, as it were, out of the eternities, " When 
thou canst no longer continue in thy work, without 
dishonor to God, discredit to religion, the loss of 
thine own integrity, the wounding of thy con- 
science, the spoiling of thy peace, and the risking 
of thy soul, then thou must believe that God will 
turn the laying aside of thy work to the advance- 
ment of his gospel." 

It took him ten years to fight that battle; he 
would have got through more speedily, but there 
was a movement in Parliament to soften down the 
ancient dogmas, and make it easier for men like 
Lindsey to say the prayers of the church. But 
nothing came of it ; you must say the prayers and 
creeds just as they stood or quit. So at last 
Mr. Lindsey prepared with his good wife to give 
up his living at Catterick, and go out into the 
world, not knowing whither they went, trusting 
in God. They did a noble stroke of work in the 
last year of their residence. The smallpox was 
making great havoc in the parish. It was still 
a matter of most painful debate whether people 
should be inoculated for this dire disease or left 
to die; and I think it was in this very year, that 
the Vicar of St. Andrews in London, preached a 
sermon from the text: " The Lord smote Job 
with sore boils," arguing that these were in some 
sort synonymous with the smallpox, and so as 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 163 

these sore boils of the modern day were also from 
the Lord, it would be rank blasphemy to try to 
prevent them by inoculation. " Not so," said 
the Lindseys. They had every child in the parish 
inoculated; the good wife saw them through the 
crisis without the least harm to any of them, and 
then with their whole means used up in this work, 
they prepared to leave, after the good vicar had 
sold his library, to save them from mere beggary, 
when they turned away from the dear old place. 

This was in November, 1773. Mr. Lindsey 
had a number of small chapels in his great ram- 
bling parish, as well as the ancient mother church, 
so he went to them all to say his last words, and 
the simple-hearted folks wept like children, when 
he told them they would see his face no more. 

They were small farmers and day laborors, 
they had no time or chance to search into these 
questions of the Trinity or Unity of God; it 
was as strange as if a Hindoo had talked to them 
of the mysteries of the Rig Vedas. 

But there was one book they could read to a 
better purpose even than their Bible, and that 
was the good parson's life through these ten years. 
That was as good to them as fine wheat, and as 
sweet as the heather on the moors, so their souls 
clave unto him, and they pleaded with him, and 
cried : " Noa, noa, parson, ye munnot leeave us, 
ye mun steaay and tak care of us, and of these 
bairns of oors. Why parson, if you be a Uni- 
tarian, so be we, dunnot leeave us, parson, we 



164 CLEAR GRIT 

will believe just what ye tell us, just steay, just 
steay, that's all we want, just steay." 

It was not the first time a man had to tear his 
heart to bleeding for the sake of his conscience, 
and it could not be the last. All the paths his 
feet had worn were closed to him, except this 
that led out into the wilderness, and if it should 
please God to the rest that remains. He got 
about $200 for his library, it was all they had 
in the world, and then the long stern fight was 
over, and he was a free man. 

You will find many papers about it all, in the 
old magazines, for the step made a great commo- 
tion. 

They all speak of Mr. Lindsey with pure re- 
spect, no matter where they stand, if they do not 
happen to be religious magazines ; and his bishop 
in parting with him said: " I have lost the best 
man I had in my whole diocese." 

He went with his wife to London to see what 
might be waiting for them there. This faith in 
the unity of the divine nature, this central truth 
to us, was winning its way then in London, as it 
was in Boston, but in the one city it was hidden 
away rather than revealed in the Presbyterian 
churches, as in the other it was hidden away in 
the Puritan churches. Men like Priestley and 
Lardner, Rees and Kippis on that side of the 
water were beyond all question Unitarians, as men 
like Mayhew and Chauncey were on this side, and 
John Milton for that matter, and John Locke, 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 165 

with a great line of men of the most excellent 
genius, learning, and holiness, only they were very 
much like some in our time, they were not what 
we call " come outers," and whispered their secret, 
as it were, to the winds. But my good old vicar 
had no such trouble as this; he had found what 
he believed to be the simple and abiding truth, and 
if there was but one man of that conviction in 
the whole world, he would be that one man. He 
had bought his freedom with a great price, and 
it was dear to him as his life, to be just what he 
was, a confessor of the truth, that there is one 
God, our Father. He could lose his living and 
his old friends, and what some call caste, but he 
could preach the truth as it had come to him, 
and this is what he did very soon after he got 
to London. 

He took a room, began to preach, and soon 
found the place crowded, so that they began to 
talk about a new chapel, and as a good many 
persons of wealth had gathered about him, this 
was easily done ; Franklin was one of those who 
helped to build that chapel, and to maintain the 
good Confessor. 

It was still standing in Essex Street a few years 
ago, close to the Strand, and while we should not 
think it was a very imposing place, I have no 
doubt that for those days it was considered quite 
splendid. I preached there in 1871, and there 
were a few present like Sir John Bowring who re- 
membered the fine old man; so it seemed to me a 



166 CLEAR GRIT 

very sacred place, as I thought of this man with 
the best there was in England at his back, " honor, 
love, obedience, troops of friends," turning away 
from that, enduring as seeing Him who is invisi- 
ble, and for the sake of a good conscience, con- 
tent to be what he became, the first Unitarian 
minister, so called by this name, in the City of 
London. 

This is the story of the good vicar, and the 
lesson from his life to me lies in his steadfast 
purpose to be honest and true to the light that 
shone for him, and then to make his life true 
to this light at the sacrifice of wealth and ease, 
place and position, and of friendships that reached 
away back into his cradle. And this is my con- 
clusion, that no matter where we belong in the 
great church of God, we should be honest and 
sincere, as this man was, and tolerate no double 
dealing in these things that touch the soul's life, 
because they lie at the very root of morals and 
of character. The most sacred ideals are hidden 
within our faith in God's truth, and the finest 
powers we can use in our life are molded and 
made fine through such believing. Nor can I 
doubt, that when a man will consent to say one 
thing while he believes another, it must be to the 
lowering of all his standards, and the debasing 
in some subtle way of his whole life beside. 

When men and women in our church, or in any 
other, say what they do not believe, it is as 
when people get hold of a bank note they do not 



THEOPHILUS LINDSEY 167 

believe in, and pass it quietly on to the next man 
who will take it, so that in time the whole cur- 
rency of God's realm, God's truth, comes at last 
to be suspected and breaks down. 

In the great central citadel of the old castles 
in England, as I remember them, there is almost 
sure to be a well of living water, sunk deep down 
in the foundations, and this was counted a most 
momentous matter ; they could store up provisions 
for a siege, but the well of living water spring- 
ing down there in the deeps, stored and sprang 
of its own sweet will, and gave them everduring 
strength to defend the place. So have I thought 
of this honest and sincere conviction of God's 
truth in a man's life. It is as a well of living 
water in the central citadel of his power, while 
the mere make-believe is as the tanks we fill, to 
find the water grow turbid and fail when we need 
it most. 

My good old vicar found the well. It was 
hard work and cost him about all he had in the 
world, but he found the well, and from that day 
he drank of the waters of the everlasting life. 

And so I know of no nobler truth than this to 
tell, 

" To thine own self be true. 
And it shall follow as the night the day. 
Thou canst not then be false to any man." 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 

The subject of my discourse this evening is 
William Ellery Channing, the foremost Apostle 
in this new world of our faith, but so broad and 
sweet in his sympathy and fellowship that a good 
Roman Catholic said : " I hug to my heart such a 
Unitarian as he was, because he was a Liberal 
Christian, and as he grew older, grew wiser in his 
charity and wider in his sympathy for those who 
were not of his own mind." And Theodore 
Parker said, when he heard of his death : " No 
man in America has left a sphere of such wide in- 
fluence, and no man since Washington has done 
so much to elevate his country." And in touch- 
ing for you the story of his noble and beautiful 
life I shall endeavor to answer two questions: 

I. Who he was, and 

II. What he was. 

And may I say at once, we find small help in seek- 
ing for an answer to my first question from what 
we can find in the old mother land ; the more's the 
pity, because grapes do not grow on thorns, so 
they must have been vines of a fine promise which 
could give us such a cluster in the fullness of time ; 
and I have no doubt that, if we could trace the 

Channings, and the Ellerys, through the far-reach- 
168 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 169 

ing ages, we should find men and women of a rare 
virtue in their humble lot, and light on many a 
story in their lives well worth the telling. Still, 
as we have the grapes we can leave the vine where 
the eternal providence has left it and go on to no- 
tice that we do know of those who have to an- 
swer the question for us : " Who was William 
Ellery Channing? " 

The mother side of the line makes its first clear 
mark in the Revolution, when grandsire Ellery 
signs the Declaration of Independence. It was 
a great regret to this good man, when he stood 
on the summit of four-score years and ten, that 
he had not made more of his life, and we must al- 
low the regret to stand, because he felt he had in 
him to do some one thing supremely well, but like 
so many young men in our own day he would not 
endure the hardness we must endure to win a 
good rank in anything, and so he let his life slip 
awa}^ as he thought, to no great purpose. But 
there was a real worth in the man far beyond 
what he gave himself credit for, which is also to 
his credit. He durst sign that Declaration, when 
for aught he knew it was a hanging matter, and 
from all that we can learn he did fairly well what- 
ever he took in hand, while, like so many more, he 
seems to have owed a good deal of the worth that 
was in him to his wife. 

He was fond of what is called good company, 
which in those days meant spending your evenings 
at a tavern. The young wife saw the peril of this 



170 CLEAR GRIT 

habit, but being a wise woman she did not fret 
and scold. She had a pretty turn for confiding 
her troubles and her joys to a little diary she 
kept, and one day she told it how glad she was 
that the evening before her husband had sat with 
her and the children in their home. It may be 
also that she left the book where she felt pretty 
sure he would find it, and who shall blame her for 
the innocent little plot ; find it he did, read the 
tender secret and said not a word about it, but 
went that evening to the tavern to say he should 
never come again ; so that peril was cleared for- 
ever from his life. 

The Channings came from Dorset in 1712, a 
county in southwestern England, and I venture 
the guess that they fled from the shadow of a 
great, sad tragedy. Richard Channing, of Dor- 
chester, married Mary Brookes about 1704, and 
her people urged on the match, but it was a great 
mistake. The result was that Mary poisoned her 
husband, was tried for the murder and was hung 
on the 21st of March, 1705, being then only 19 
years of age, and after she was dead her body was 
burnt in the old Roman amphitheater at Maum- 
bury in the presence of 10,000 people. Now, 
when your Englishman in humble life strikes 
a sorrow like this he moves away, so my guess is 
that John Channing left Dorset simply because 
he could not live so near the scene of this great 
sorrow, to have people whisper wherever he went, 
his brother's wife was burnt in Maumbury. Be 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 171 

this as it may, when we find them here there is no 
shadow on their life. 

Grandsire Channing is a merchant in Newport, 
who falls on evil days, lays down the burden of his 
Jife, and then his wife takes it up, keeps a little 
store, but is still every inch a lady, and makes the 
truth good that " we cannot call him fatherless 
who has God and his mother," for she raised her 
children well, William among the rest of them, 
who took to the law, rose to some eminence and 
married Lucy Ellery, one of the little tribe about 
whom the mother told her joy to the diary, and 
from these twain sprang William Ellery Chan- 
ning. He was a good man, this elder William, 
but he died when he was forty-two, and left their 
mother, a delicate little woman, with nine chil- 
dren. So she took up the burden and bore it 
bravely and beautifully, with the grand silent 
pride of our people. They are all good, then, 
these American ancestors, so far as we can trace 
them, and this answers the first question, " Who 
was Channing.'^ " He sprang from wholesome 
people, but, as might be expected, when we want 
to find the reason on our human side for such a 
man as this, the mother side is the best. 

My second question, " What was Channing.? " 
brings us to the boy first, and then the man. He 
was a lovely little fellow, they say, with great 
gray eyes that grew deep and luminous when his 
soul began to look through them, the eyes of a 
prophet and a seer. A boy with a splendid over- 



17a CLEAR GRIT 

plus of life in him, also a capital wrestler, when 
he began to find his thews and sinews, fond of 
pitching quoits, of climbing to the masthead of 
any handy vessel too, and then coming down 
swiftly by the ropes, and of splashing about in 
that delicious turmoil of salt water down there by 
Newport, able also to thrash the usual bigger boy, 
and doing it, not on his own account, but because 
the tyrant had imposed on a weaker child, a boy, 
as I guess also, with a genuine appetite, for his 
first idea of heaven's glory was an old black cook. 
Full of life, but slow at his books, like Burns and 
Scott and others one might name, who have won a 
great place, and especially at fault in the dead 
tongues, that ugly incubus of the schools in those 
days, but tugging away at whatever he took in 
hand, doing his best. " Come, Bill," a young 
clerk cries, " they say you are a fool, but I know 
better, I can teach you Latin," and it was so, be- 
cause no doubt the kindly young fellow touched 
the nerve of true teaching, which is not the peda- 
gogue and pupil, but the elder helping the 
younger along the rugged way, as Arnold of 
Rugby did with such a wonderful success. 

It is related of Lessing, that when he was to sit, 
as a child, for his portrait, they wanted him to be 
taken with a bird-cage in his hand : " No," said 
the child, " you must paint me with a great pile of 
books." There is some such prophetic touch in 
this picture of the boy I am trying to sketch; he 
lisped in sermons, for the sermons came, called 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 173 

in his congregation by drumming on an old warm- 
ing-pan — and what a dim old world that is in 
which we elder folks find the warming-pan ! 

One of his texts is remembered, that pathetic 
cry of the child in the wheat field, " Father, my 
head, my head," and surely there is the stuff for 
a preacher in the boy who can find such a text, no 
matter about the sermon. There he stands on his 
stool, the little fellow, with the beautiful gray 
eyes and sunny, flowing hair. He wist not that 
he was about his Father's business, any more than 
his father and mother did; but like Mary, his 
mother kept all these sayings in her heart for the 
day when that stool would grow to be the loftiest 
and broadest pulpit on the earth, and the gray 
eyes would see heaven. 

There is one more touch to this picture of the 
boy, who came to be called the little minister, 
opening toward the old truth that the child is fa- 
ther of the man. His father went one day to 
hear a famous preacher, and took the boy with 
him. It was a sermon in which the only light that 
shone came from the lurid fires of the pit, and 
cast a red glare on all things God has done, so 
that the boy's soul was shaken to its center. 
" Sound doctrine, sir," a neighbor said to Mr. 
Channing as they came out of church, and then 
the boy said in his affrighted heart, it is all true. 
But as they rode home his father began to whistle. 
" How can he do that ? " the boy wondered, " the 
only thing to do now, is to hasten home and tell 



174f CLEAR GRIT 

mother about those fires," but what the good man 
did was to tilt his feet to the cheery blaze on his 
own hearthstone and begin to read his paper. 
Then from that day the boy made up his mind 
about the worth of such sermons. How could he 
believe in them and not end by being an utter athe- 
ist, the tender-hearted, sensitive little fellow, who 
saw some rats in a cage one day and was so smit- 
ten by their distress, that he opened the door 
forthwith and let them go, the little Newport 
Buddha. So this is Channing the boy, bright, 
strong, active and full of life, revealing by hints 
and flashes the coming man. 

Once more the youth and earliest manhood is 
true to this promise. The father dies when Chan- 
ning is still a boy of thirteen, leaves the deli- 
cate wife with nine children, as I said, and then 
we see what we see so often in such a case. The 
boys close in about the mother, a day has made 
them men, a tender brooding love is in their hearts. 
The Ellerys and Channings close up the ranks 
also, with the silent pride in them of our people; 
the mother and family become God's legacy to 
them. There is no wild cry of, " God help them, 
what will they do," or " What can we do for them," 
— this is now their trust. Mene Tekel is not to 
be written on the walls of their living rooms, the 
children must not lose their rank because they 
have lost their father, and William is sent to Har- 
vard. Harvard, however, was an evil place in 
those days, fair morals were at a discount, for 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 175 

the youths had taken the bit in their teeth. The 
foundations of society were shaken by the human 
earthquake over there in France, and boys, hardly 
better fitted to grapple with the vast deep myste- 
ries of life than a fly running across the page is to 
understand " Hamlet," thought they had solved all 
the problems, and could look down with a fine 
patronage even on the eternal verities, while so 
blind were those who had the oversight of the an- 
cient seat of learning that to cure all this, the 
best they could do, was to make a present to 
every young man of Watson's " Apology For The 
Bible." "Apology For The Bible!" old King 
George cried, when he heard of the book, " why, 
the Bible needs no apology ; " and certainly the 
young men of Harvard did not need such a book 
as that. But Channing went through Harvard 
without harm, because sunshine takes no taint 
from the gutter, and in him was light. He would 
not drink wine or strong drink and so anticipate 
the fine powers of his manhood, or undermine them 
by an indulgence which in this fervid sky of ours 
cuts a youth like steel and burns like fire, so he 
came through nobly, and took the first honor. 
The Kentuckian, when he saw him in later life, 
cried, "Why, is that Doctor Channing.? I 
thought he must be six feet tall." He was a 
very little man when he had come to his growth, 
the marrow of his mother. He gave a friend of 
mine a coat about 1840, and it was given to me in 
1862. It is lost now with so many of our treas- 



176 CLEAR GRIT 

ures except as much as goes to a sermon cover. 
That coat would be a fair fit for a smallish boy. 
But he came out of Harvard with all the promise 
made good; strong as finely tempered steel, with 
a rare ringing laugh in him, free of his tongue 
also, but with a perfect instinct for clean 
thoughts and pure words, blunt and abrupt, and, 
as might be expected of such rare wine in 
fermentation, with thoughts and emotions in a 
cloud of eager unrest. " You are a baby in 
your emotions," his brother Francis said, and 
so he was. He could weep over Rogers, the poet, 
and a sonnet of Southey's even, a thing as help- 
less to draw tears from human eyes now as a 
bundle of dry sticks. He thought Mary Wat- 
stancroft the greatest woman of her age. He 
admired the genius of Rousseau and of William 
Goodwin, but balked at their unbelief, and 
dreamed at one time of joining a sort of Scotch 
Commune. 

The truth is, the young man was as fine a rad- 
ical in those days as one wants to see, and for that 
reason at his age as fine a man. 

Miss Lucy Osgood told me once she heard him 
preach his first sermon, in her father's church at 
Medford, and what an impression it made on her, 
and how her father said, " That young man will 
one day be the greatest preacher in these States " ; 
so the stool in the nursery had made good its 
prophecy, and Channing struck his election, shall 
I say, through his honest and intolerable revolt 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 177 

at the scorn and contempt which was poured on 
the Christian faith all about him. The story of 
his preparation for the pulpit I have no time to 
tell, but one grand factor in this preparation 
it would be fatal to leave out. It is the habit of 
our liberal faith to make light of what our or- 
thodox brethren call a change of heart, conver- 
sion, and the new birth ; but I say that, once truly 
apprehended, this change of heart, this conver- 
sion, this new birth, is the most essential human 
experience of which I have any knowledge, and of 
all men in the world it is most essential to the man 
who is called to be an apostle separated unto the 
gospel of God. 

It is that point in the history of human souls 
at which we pass from the first man of the earth 
earthy, to the second man, which is the Lord from 
heaven — the day which may come once for all, 
or once and again when the solemn lights of the 
eternal life rise on the soul, and she passes from 
her own self-seeking and the fret and worry of it 
into that grand calm rest in God which was in his 
Christ. Conversion, a change of heart, the new 
birth! It lifted Wesley out of his posturing and 
pondering over himself into the front rank among 
apostles ; made a new man of Thomas Chalmers, 
kindling mighty fires in him that set Scotland afire ; 
and taught Thomas Guthrie to teach ragged 
schools. And so, sweet as he was, and pure, and 
true, Channing had to go through this travail of 
the new birth before he could begin to live his life 



178 CLEAR GRIT 

and do his work ; he had to give himself utterly to 
God, to count moral attainment secondary, and 
supreme love to the Supreme Love the end of all 
striving. So what was Channing as he stood up 
to preach that day in Medford? 1 answer, he 
was a man who had passed through this deep ex- 
perience and found the new life. The solemn lights 
of the eternal world smote him, as they smote 
Paul, and he is one in this with all the great apos- 
tles from Paul's day to our own. That's Metho- 
dism, you say ; well, it will be a long day before I 
deride this element in Methodism, fairly and truly 
understood. I believe in it with my whole heart, 
and can most heartily sympathize with another 
saying of that same old King George, when they 
told him Whitfield was mad with his doctrine of 
conversion ; he said, " Then I wish he would bite 
some of my Bishops ! " 

But when the young man stands up to preach 
that sermon he has struck a great trouble. The 
fine vigor has gone out of him, and with forty 
years of work before him he is a broken man. 
It is the old sad story of a soul of fire in a bod}^ of 
glass ; he could not suspect he was in any great 
danger, and there is a very beautiful motive 
within his ruthlessness. He was earning money 
as a tutor in the South, and would scrape and 
save for the mother and children he had left in the 
North, for he was in God's stead as a father to the 
little flock. The mother and his kinsfolk knew 
nothing about it. They had taken care he should 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 179 

go warm, and live not over hardly, but he did not 
heed them. If there is a sin therefore for the 
Holy Ghost, for which there is no condemnation 
either in this world or in that which is to come, 
William Channing committed that sin. He faced 
the bitter weather with scant clothing, injured the 
delicate frame like one of the old anchorites, and 
so it was that after eighteen months he came home 
the mere ghost of the splendid young fellow we 
have seen. 

He said once, " I feel as if I wanted several lives 
to do what I have to do," but he must get along 
in this world now with the fitful powers of one. 
L[e must watch how the winds blow, consult the 
thermometer, creep out into the sun when he can, 
be anxious about the draughts, sit dolefully in his 
study watching the weather vane, and wondering 
how it can point due east so long in one instance 
we hear of, until a friend happens in and tells 
him that the thing has rusted on its pivot, and 
the sweet, soft winds have been blowing many a 
day. 

So it is a sick man we have to watch henceforth, 
but a man so mighty through the indwelling spirit 
of God, that I doubt whether the strongest man 
in New England did a better stroke of work apart 
from the things that belong to his distinct gen- 
ius. 

The church to which they called him was a for- 
lorn hope, a small gathering of humble people of 
no particular brand; he built it up to its great- 



180 CLEAR GRIT 

ness, not alone through his preaching, but through 
that steady loyalty to the whole detail of a true 
ministry, which is, in the long run, quite as essen- 
tial as our preaching. He must know his people 
as well as see them, go from house to house, gather 
the children about him as well as the elders, be a 
minister as well as a preacher, and so far as I can 
make out that work was never better done than in 
the Federal Street parish, while his strength held 
out. They were long sermons, almost an hour, 
and two of these each Sunday, with utter prostra- 
tion, as if you were sinking through the earth 
Monday and Tuesday ; but there he was on the 
track again by Wednesday, diligent as ever, a 
workman that needed not to be ashamed, even had 
all his powers kept their first perfection. He 
made the dear old mother mistress of his house, 
and the children the father had left his family. 
No bachelor hall for him, and no wife, until this 
most sacred duty was done, and this loving longing 
satisfied; sweet Ruth Gibbs must not interfere 
with this one cherished purpose. While as we see 
him, a little dimly to be sure, we have to guess that 
the mother is more than a little fretful, the long 
strain has told on her, but she is as the saints 
to her son, who plots and lays little mines of gen- 
erous surprise for her and for the family, and will 
insist on it that they shall count fair, which means 
that he shall be simply counted one, just as he was 
when he had not a dollar to bring into the treas- 
ury, no masterhood, no sign of it, only the divine 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 181 

word of his Christ and ours, " He that will be 
greatest among you, let him serve." 

Some young men who are moved to preach, 
Baxter says, are like young tadpoles, the one half 
is moved, while the other half is mud ; but when 
Master Osgood of Medford said, " that 3^oung 
man will be the foremost preacher in America," 
he spoke by the book. There was the voice, mu- 
sical, they say, as the ideals of the greatest com- 
posers. There was the fine fruit of the lesson he 
had learned as he rode home with his father, that 
when you talk of these great mysteries of life 
and the life to come, you shall not talk so that 
your hearers will whistle as they go home and 
take up their paper with their feet to the fire. 
He took Euclid once for his summer diversion 
when he was a youth ; I think it was a hint of the 
coming man, who would say no word which was not 
as true to him as geometry. Then there was an- 
other quality. " You used to be a son of thun- 
der," one said to a minister once, " but how is 
it you are now so gentle? " " I will tell you," the 
old man answered, " I used to think it was 
the thunder that did the work ; I find now it is the 
lightning." So Channing found at the first, yet 
it was seldom as the lightning that shivers with a 
bolt, it was as this subtle and wonderful fluid 
rather which floods the universe with tides of life, 
and can whisper loving or sad messages clean 
round the world. But the bolt was there, the gen- 
tlest man could be the sternest, and most fatal of 



im CLEAR GRIT 

stroke, and no hand was so mighty to slay, when 
through long brooding over some intolerable 
wrong the forces of the spirit had gathered them- 
selves to the storm. It was this stripling who 
slew Napoleon ; his revelation of the real nature 
and purpose of the man was a prophecy all the 
years make good. He had turned France into a 
Golgotha in his lust for power, and women and 
children were weeping for their dead all over the 
civilized world. The freedom for which France 
had fought with such a blind desperation was tak- 
ing the form and pressure of a new tyranny, and 
her tyrant was also her idol. Channing saw 
through the mask; this was to him the devil who 
had got loose, and there were those in Boston of 
his mind ; the old Puritan spirit could not be 
cheated into admiration of imperialism, so it must 
thank God when the idol fell. 

You elders know the story ; I tell it to the new 
generation. The people crowded into the old 
King's Chapel, Dr. Freeman read the lessons, and 
the sentences seemed to have been written for the 
time. " Babylon the great has fallen. Hallelu- 
jah, Praise ye the Lord," the old man shouted, as 
his frame lifted and his eyes kindled to the grand 
conclusion, and burst into tears, and the people 
sprang to their feet and shouted, " Praise ye the 
Lord." 

Then this small, slender person rises and looks 
on them, with those great, luminous eyes. Those 
who heard his sermon said it is not on the paper. 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 183 

It was as one of the old prophets come again 
with a burden, the lightning was abroad, smiting 
through the rains of tender pity for the slain. 
" Who will not rejoice? " he cries. " Who will not 
catch and repeat the acclamation, the oppressor 
is fallen, the world is free," — and again the peo- 
ple rose and shouted, " The world is free." He 
towered high, they say, for that instant. It was 
the spirit that towered; here was the great angel 
again standing in the sun ; mortality was swal- 
lowed up of life. 

Of Channing's doctrines, genius and character 
I have no time to speak ; what I wanted to do was 
to afford some glimpse of the man, and even here I 
must fail in part, for who shall put a girdle round 
such a life in forty minutes? But in a word, here 
was New England, burnt over by the ancient or- 
thodoxy, shorn of its utter sincerity ; men were 
whistling and taking up their papers after listen- 
ing to the most terrible sermons all over the land. 
The old deep streams had run dry, and there was 
no rain. The word must be made sincere again, 
and men must be won, not through fear but love. 
Channing poured out those marvelous sermons, 
his soul went out with them, and there was a new 
spring. 

Slaver}^ came up as the one burning question. 
Garrison had organized his society; some think 
Channing lingered a moment too long before he 
threw the weight of his influence into the scale. 
He said the slaveholder to him was an abstrac- 



184 CLEAR GRIT 

tion. " But he isn't an abstraction to the slave," 
Garrison answered, and the shot went home. 
" We need you, sir," Samuel J. May said, and he 
saw his duty then, once for all. They were not 
with him in his church ; they refused him the use 
of it for an anti-slavery meeting. Those far- 
looking eyes may have foreseen also what we have 
seen, and Channing's very soul revolted at war; 
so if there was a pause, and I am not here to wor- 
ship an idol, but to look at a man, think how the 
sensitive spirit was held by these ties, and then 
remember he did give his whole soul and strength 
in the great debate. 

But I should be sorry, in one last word, if you 
have got the impression that by reason of his fee- 
bleness Channing's life for forty years lay 
mainly in the shadow. I think it was a very pleas- 
ant and cheery life, not as the babbling brook, 
but as the deep, pure river. God gave him his 
best gift, a good wife, quiet, sweet and restful, 
and children that stayed and children that just 
brushed his home with the wings of their angelhood 
and then were translated, that they should not 
see death. The summer home at Newport used 
to overflow with people, so that often they had 
to sleep somewhere else, and choice souls com- 
muned with him from far and wide. 

When he went abroad, men like Coleridge and 
Wordsworth welcomed him, and he rode once with 
the poet in a country cart, but that was not po- 
etry, even with the lakes and mountains all about 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING 185 

him. The old hilarity died in the south, but he 
could prance with the children still, and tell them 
stories out of his own head, and quite forget the 
moral. A touch of humor also would flash out now 
and then. " Sent your wife to Newport, have 
you, because you don't like to go to get the house 
ready .? " hearty old Tuckerman cried, " I would 
not send my wife to do what I didn't like to do my- 
self." " Nor would your wife go if you did send 
her," Channing answered, for they were both fond 
of such swift fence. 

A little maid who went to the summer house one 
day said, " Ah ! this is heaven," and little maids 
don't say that of a dismal place. It is among 
the traditions that he had that secret of charming 
a wild horse by touch and whisper, the charm of 
some of the elder saints, but while he could stop a 
horse, he could not make one go. The creatures 
soon got to know him and to take their own time ; 
perhaps among themselves these creatures can pass 
the news along, and those rats may have whis- 
pered, " He is quite harmless ; don't mind him.'* 

" I have received many messages from the 
spirit," he whispered, as the last moment drew on, 
and then, on a Sunday evening, in the splendor of 
Autumn, just as the sun set, while the light was 
flooding the worn face, the spirit was set free from 
its tabernacle of clay, the last message had come. 
Channing had gone home, mortality was swal- 
lowed up of life. 



JAMES MARTINEAU 

Since the news was flashed over to us,* that 
James Martineau was dead, I have thought that I 
would love to say some word about his life, and 
life's work, so noble to me, and beautiful as it must 
be to thousands in the old world and the new, who 
have known him as a man, or through the books he 
published, which hold the choicest treasure of his 
life and genius, which in such a man are essentially 
one and the same. And touching his life, three 
memories return to me which I will dwell on for a 
few moments. One is from the life of his eminent 
sister, and two are my own. 

His sister says : " I remember when I was 
under three years of age, that I was in our best 
chamber one day, where the curtains were drawn, 
and the blinds let down, so that I was afraid. But 
the nurse was there also, who set me down in a 
tiny chair, and laid something on my lap wrapped 
in soft flannel, and unfolding the wrapping I saw 
the little red face of a baby." It was the face of 
her brother James, one day old, the man child, 
whose life was to be prolonged so far beyond the 
three score years and ten set down in the ancient 
psalm as the fair limit of our human life, and so 

* Delivered at the Church of the Messiah, New York City, 
on March 4, 1900, after the death of Martineau. 
186 



JAMES MARTINEAU 187 

free from the labor and sorrow the seer says will 
fall to the lot of those, who by reason of their 
strength come to four score years. 

No such penalty was laid on him as this the old 
seer thought of, to the end of almost four score 
and fifteen years, when his lovers and friends in 
the great city looked for the last time on the face 
his small sister saw for the first time, on the 
twenty-first of April in the year 1805. 

Then my own memory belongs to a time twenty- 
eight years ago last summer, when I was invited 
to preach the sermon at the annual meeting of 
the British and Foreign Unitarian Association in 
London, and there for the first time I saw the 
face and heard the voice of our " James, a servant 
of God," — the voice so soft and clear, but by no 
means loud, reminding you of the voice of our 
own Orville Dewey. I was his guest also in the 
home where he died just now, and preached in his 
chapel on a Sunday when he took the printed serv- 
ices, and sat with him one sunny morning in his 
Library through some happy hours, — happy, that 
is, to me. I remember also saying with regret, 
when we parted, " I would so love to hear you 
preach, sir, but shall not be able." " Well," he 
answered, " we will do the next best thing, or per- 
haps the better ; I will give you a sermon I have 
not printed." The sermon was burnt in the great 
fire in Chicago a month after we came home, with 
most of my own. 

This was the first time I came in touch with our 



188 CLEAR GRIT 

great and good apostle, and the memory is as 
clear, almost, as when I left him that day. He 
was then well turned the sixty years of age, 
but his eyes were not dim, or his natural strength 
abated ; they were the seer's eyes, blue shot 
through with gray, keen some moments as the 
glance of an eagle, and steadfast as the 
stars, a man still in the fair latter summer of our 
life. 

My second memory is of a day in the summer 
before last, when I was in London, and a message 
came that he would be glad to see me for half an 
hour. He was in his ninety-fourth year then, and 
greatly changed since I saw him before. The 
silver cord of life was loosed, but the golden bowl 
was not broken. The good old hand shook now, 
which had clasped mine in that warm, strong clasp 
so many years ago, but he braced himself when 
we sat down, and then it lay quite still on his knee. 
I have noticed that when we attain to such an 
age, or say, beyond the four score, we are rather 
given to speak of it with a touch of pride, if we 
are well still, and strong, but if we are touched by 
the penalty we have heard of in the psalm, we dwell 
on our complaints and perhaps augment them by 
complaining. No word of this on either hand fell 
from his lips of self felicitation or regret. He 
took the third option, and began presently to tell 
me of his youth and early manhood, when he was 
a student in the fine old city of York preparing 
for the ministry, and how the small band of 



JAMES MARTINEAU 189 

students would go out from the city on Sunday 
afternoons to hold services in the villages, how 
thoroughly he enjoyed those services they held in 
the cottages and farmhouses, and how glad he 
had been to hear within no long time that there 
was still a flowering in some of those villages from 
the seed they had planted so long ago in the York- 
shire wolds. 

He said, " Our dear tutor, Mr. Wellbeloved, 
was quite anxious about this, that we should al- 
ways preach from a manuscript; so we took one 
with us, but would be so eager to say what was in 
our hearts, but not on the paper, that we would 
brush that aside, and pour out the word, fresh 
from the fountain ; but we did not tell the master, 
and I think he did not ask us." 

The good patriarch grew almost hilarious over 
these memories; there was a joy in them which 
held no grain of sadness. He had returned, for 
the moment, to the days of his youth, and the 
scripture for him was fulfilled. So we said good- 
by presently, and I saw his face no more. 

Shall I mention another memory, which touches 
my own life? My dear mother was a little maiden 
of seven years, in the same old city of Norwich, 
when James Martineau was born, and I wonder 
whether she may have peered through the gate on 
some pleasant summer's day, in the early years 
and seen the child playing there among the plants 
and flowers. The pretty home and garden were 
there thirty years ago, — and may be still, but I 



190 CLEAR GRIT 

am not sure, — an English home down to the 
ground, and the picture of a simple elegance. 

The father and mother were Presbyterians by 
name, and Calvinists by tradition rather than by 
conviction, as so many are now, and worshiped in 
the octagon chapel still there, built midway in the 
last century, of which good John Wesley writes 
in his Journal : " I was shewn Dr. Taylor's new 
meeting house, perhaps the most elegant in 
Europe. It is eight square, and built of the finest 
brick. The inside is finished in the finest taste, 
and is as clean as any nobleman's saloon, the very 
latches on the doors are polished brass. How can 
it be thought that the homely old gospel should 
find admission here?" I wonder what the old 
saint would say, if he could return and see some 
churches here of his own denomination. 

I said they were Presbyterians by name and 
only Calvinists by tradition, for the leaven of the 
faith we hold and maintain was in the heart of 
the church, which is Unitarian now, and has been 
more than eighty years. Indeed the story of the 
change is very much the same as that of the Puri- 
tan churches in New England, which became Uni- 
tarian by name early in this century, as they had 
been by growth in grace and the knowledge of the 
truth long before they took the name. 

And as the church was, so was the home, free 
from the iron-clad dogma and the barbed " fine 
points," and sister Harriet says the Sundays were 
pleasant days for the children, — a good report 



JAMES MARTINEAU 191 

of the home, for over there, as in our New Eng- 
land then, the Sabbath was so sore a burden, so 
full of gloom and burdensome, that John Ruskin 
tells us he began to be afraid of the next Sunday, 
when he was a boy, by Wednesday. 

I may note also, before I pass on, that when 
the boy James was about eight years old, this old 
Presbyterian church came out into the open and 
adopted our name, called a meeting of delegates 
from the other churches of our faith in eastern 
England, organized a missionary society and 
held the first annual meeting in the octagon chapel. 

And now if there was time we might glance at 
the schools through which the boy passed, but I 
can only mention one. When he was sixteen the 
careful father had made up his mind that James 
should be an engineer, a good and noble calling 
then and always. So he was placed in a machine 
shop to learn the craft, but at the end of about a 
year, he threw up his hands, and said, " I cannot 
be an engineer. I must study for the ministry." 
He had been to a school in Bristol under the care 
of Dr. Carpenter, the minister of our chapel, a 
devout man, and full of the Holy Ghost, and had 
caught the holy fire from him which was to burn 
to so grand a purpose, while the death of a dear 
kinsman had also turned his heart toward the 
ministry as the true work of his life. The good 
father was troubled, and, being what we call a 
man of the world, he said, " My son, to study for 
the ministry is the way to poverty," with more to 



192 CLEAR GRIT 

the same purpose, but the youth held his own, and 
so was sent to our small college in York, about 
which he told me the bright story, as we sat to- 
gether those moments in his home. He must not 
be an engineer but an evangelist, and so the mys- 
tery of foreordination and election flashes out for 
a moment, so I love to believe, as he stands there 
at the parting of the ways. 

May I linger for a few moments over his early 
life.? It was a college course of five years in 
York, completed when he was twenty-two years 
of age ; then he taught the school in Bristol for Dr. 
Carpenter, and at twenty-three was ordained by 
the Presbyterian brotherhood and called to be the 
assistant minister of the old church of that name 
in Dublin, which was partly supported by a gift 
from the Crown, so called, of an old date, but 
really it was mainly, as he found, wrung from the 
hapless Roman Catholics, and this was a grain of 
flint in the eye of the young man's soul. Tlie 
church would not refuse the tainted gift, no 
matter how he pleaded. He refused to take the 
money, and got pupils to eke out his poor stipend. 
He was married two months after his ordination, 
and two children had blessed the home ; the care- 
ful father's words seemed to be coming true, that 
the ministry was the open way to poverty, but 
James Martineau could not pawn his soul for 
that hundred pounds a year or the wealth of a 
kingdom, so he threw up his ministry and pre- 
pared to go out, not knowing whither he went. 



JAMES MARTINEAU 19S 

But there was a strong church in Liverpool, 
wanting just such a man. They had heard of 
him, some had heard him, so they opened their 
arms and their hearts in a warm welcome. Their 
beloved pastor of the many years was no longer 
able to bear the whole burden and do the work, 
so they must take hold together, as father and 
son, and here was the open door, through which 
he passed about sixty-eight years ago, to win his 
most eminent place in our ministry as " James, a 
servant of God." And here is a pen portrait of 
the young apostle, as he stood there in the pulpit, 
for the first time, by his life-long friend, Charles 
Wicksteed : 

" A tall young man, thin, but of a vigorous and 
muscular frame, with dark hair, pale but not 
delicate complexion, a countenance in repose full 
of thought, and in animation of intelligence and 
enthusiasm. Features of no regular type or order 
of beauty, yet giving you the impression of very 
high beauty, and a voice so sweet and clear, yet not 
loud, that it held the inspiration without any of 
the art or intention. When this young man, with 
the background of his honor and courage rose to 
speak of the inspiration that was not in the letter, 
but in the soul, a bold stand to take at that time, 
we were all taken captive." 

A bold stand to take in that first sermon, and 
the very soul of his teaching from that time to 
the end of his noble life ! The stand our own 
great apostle Channing takes when he says. 



194< CLEAR GRIT 

" Jesus came, not to shut us up in a book, but 
to open the universe, as the school of our spirit- 
ual education " ; and again, " We cannot compre- 
hend God aright if we do not go beyond revelation 
and learn in religion from all that we observe." 
And he says, " Channing was the inspirer of my 
youth; he led the young men fully to realize what 
was meant by freedom of the spirit, and the reli- 
gion of the inward life, and that the foundations of 
Christian truth were in the soul, and must not be 
left to any proof of miracles, and the human soul 
is called to a direct personal communion with 
God." 

But our young apostle soon found that Liver- 
pool, apart from our churches, three all told, 
was a hornet's nest, — a stronghold of the most 
conservative orthodoxy. Her ministers sounded 
the alarm we have heard so often in this century; 
the church was in danger, and the faith once de- 
livered to the saints. These three men must be 
answered, and silenced, — John Hamilton Thorn, 
Henry Giles and James Martineau ! 

Thirteen ministers of the orthodox faith and 
order challenged them to the battle, — thirteen to 
three, — and they took the odds gladly. Marti- 
neau answered them on his part in five lectures : — 
The Bible, What it is, and What it is not; The 
Dogma that Christ is God proven to be false from 
the Bible ; The Scheme of Vicarious Redemption 
Inconsistent with itself, and with the Christian Idea 
of Salvation; The Christian View of Moral Evil; 



JAMES MARTINEAU 195 

and Christianity without Priest and without 
Ritual. 

The lectures were printed, and Channing writes 
to his sister : " I have read all your broth- 
er's lectures ; they seem to me to be among 
the noblest efforts of our time; they have quick- 
ened and instructed me; indeed, these and Mr. 
Thom's give me a new hope for the cause of truth 
in England." And all we know beside is this, that 
while no doubt the champions of the old faith felt 
sure they had won the day, no challenge to an- 
other combat has ever been given in Liverpool 
from that side, and I need hardly say, none has 
been given from ours, save in the steadfast preach- 
ing of our gospel by the noble lives of men who 
succeeded Dr. Martineau in the Hope Street 
church and the sister churches in that city. 

An eminent minister in this city said some years 
ago that he thought short pastorates are a provi- 
dential arrangement for the relief of sorely tried 
congregations, while we know it was not true of 
men like Henry Bellows, James Freeman Clark, 
Cyrus Bartol, or, in all the long pastorates of 
those we have known and loved, that of my dear 
Father Furness, a ministry of seventy-two years 
all told. And it was not true of our " James, a 
servant of God," whose ministry in the church in 
Liverpool clasped twenty-five years to its heart, 
and was still sweet and welcome as the flowers in 
May, when he must needs leave them, to take 
charge of our college in London, and also of a 



19^ CLEAR GRIT 

church. Their sorrow, when he must leave them, 
is not to be told. The elder members would speak 
of it to me fourteen years after, when I preached 
there the first time, and so far as I remember have 
never failed to do this on any visit since then to 
my mother land, nor can I do better here than 
to cite his own words to them in a sermon, preached 
at the close of sixteen years, for evidence of its 
worth. 

" Nothing has been nearer my heart," he says, 
" than to substitute among you the religion of 
consciousness for the religion of custom. And it 
is a truth too plain to miss, that it is the business 
of religion to preside over our inner world, to 
rule the thoughts, to quiet the passions and to 
elevate the will. It is also true that the condi- 
tion of the inner world and life itself determines 
our religion, and as the affections are pure and 
deep, the conscience clear and strong, and the 
mind familiar with great and beautiful examples, 
are the heavenly realities discerned, while in the 
mind barren with selfishness the very roots are 
withered from which the blossoms of holy hope 
must spring. And until the soul attains some 
loftiness, by the free and faithful activity of her 
best powers, faith is not possible; but when she 
has come to this spirit and temper, misgivings 
will trouble her no more. Men rise then into the 
truth of God, as into a vision denied to the lower 
level and the sluggish soul. They must lift their 
feet upon the mountains, make them feel the wing 



JAMES MARTINEAU 197 

of the upland air, and pass the cloud-belt that 
floats between earth and heaven ; then they will dis- 
cern the palace of the Infinite and feel the silence 
of the Eternal." 

Again, when the cornerstone of the noble new 
church was laid, nine years before he left them, 
he said : " This structure is not destined to in- 
terpose between the soul and God, but to bring 
them into intimate personal communion. We 
build a place, not for the high altar, but for the 
humble heart, where the worship will not be for 
the people, but hy them ; a place where the min- 
ister comes as a man among men, conscious of 
their frailties, their sorrows, their aspirations, and 
only through his partnership in these is he able to 
help them in preaching, and acknowledge them 
without pretense in prayer, by the sympathy of 
mind with mind, and of heart to heart." 

This is the keynote of his ministry through 
these twenty-five years, and then through all the 
years to the end, while to my own mind and heart, 
the volumes entitled " Endeavors after the Chris- 
tian Life," and " Hours of Thought on Sacred 
Things," contain the finest essence of his purely 
religious teaching, of which it has been well said: 
" In these sermons nothing repels you or divides. 
The appeal is to the deepest within us and springs 
from a spiritual confidence in which we too con- 
fide. We do not question; we receive. The heal- 
ing influence steals on us like the salt breath of 
the sea. We say this man knows our needs, spirit 



198 CLEAR GRIT 

speaks to spirit, while at the same time he is manly 
and healthy, and in perfect harmony with human 
reason." And " England will be likely to see 
another Gladstone, Tennyson, Ruskin or Arnold 
before she sees another Martineau." When he 
left Liverpool for London, he said to his old 
friends and his flock : " Gain does not tempt me, 
for I go to a poorer life ; or ambition, for I retire 
to one less conspicuous ; or ease, for I commit my- 
self to unsparing labor. And of the unbounded 
freedom and confidence you have so nobly given 
me here, it is no secret to me that I must expect 
less, even though I should deserve more. But 
none of these things move me from the feeling 
that the work proposed to me is of all things 
that which I can best fulfill, and that in being hu- 
manly off'ered, it is also providentially arranged." 
And this was true ; the old chapel, where he min- 
istered through fourteen years, is hardly equal, 
as some of you know, to a New England meeting- 
house of the old tenor in a third-rate country 
town, while the church he must leave is one of the 
finest in Liverpool of any name. There, Longfel- 
low says in 1864, " I went to hear Martineau ; 
he is refined and agreeable, and there is no great 
show of carriages at the door." This is all our 
good poet says, and the absence of carriages may 
be explained in part by a saying current among 
our people over there, that when Unitarian fami- 
lies rise in the world and grow rich, the third 
generation is very apt to turn the heads of their 



JAMES MARTINEAU 199 

carriage horses toward the doors of the Episcopal 
church. 

It was a small chapel, and, as I have been told, 
seldom full. 

Frances Power Cobbe, a noble woman, as you 
know, and constant hearer, speaking of his min- 
istry in London, says : " People, to our wonder, 
would come once or twice, and then no more. 
They expected, I think, to hear a sermon which 
would chime in with their own ideas, and went 
away sorrowful, for they had great ^r^-posses- 
sions. This was my own case for a time. We 
did not, of course, expect sermons like those of 
which Tennyson's Farmer Old Style says : ' I 
thowt a said what a owt to a said an' I coomed 
awaay.' We expected a later Luther, a soldier 
priest, a reformer, whose work was to sweep away 
old errors like the sands of Egypt and reveal a 
temple on the rock below. Dr. Martineau never 
seemed to want to win us to repeat any shibboleth 
after him, or to forswear those of any other man 
or of any church. Sometimes we even imagined 
that he read us an old sermon without remember- 
ing to bring its theology up-to-date — the dear, 
good hearers ! But by degrees those of us who 
remained put aside our expectations of a teacher 
whose lessons could be formulated in a catechism, 
and then we found a companion like Bunyan's 
Great Heart for the celestial way, one with whose 
mind it was a joy and benediction to come into 
contact even for an hour, and returning home 



£00 CLEAR GRIT 

from such sermons the home and the daily life fell 
into their true place. Care was minified, Duty 
magnified, and Affection strengthened and en- 
nobled by a sympathy we felt to be divine and 
deathless. It was only when these sermons came 
to a sudden ending, that we knew how much they 
had counted for us in our life. A window in 
our house was closed, like the window in the 
House Beautiful, and it looked toward the sun ris- 
ing." 

And so, as you read these sermons, and listen 
to this testimony from one of the noblest women of 
our time, you may well ask how it was that the 
small chapel in a by-street could hold his hearers 
through those fourteen years. To be sure, he 
was a branded heretic, but no such sermons had 
been heard in London since the times of Jeremy 
Taylor, nor do I think that even those of " the 
Shakespeare of divines " can match them in " the 
beauty of order, the nobihty of tone, the chastened 
enthusiasm, and the charm of sincerity " — I cite 
again from a secular journal. 

And as the magnet to the pole star, they are 
true to the stand he takes in Liverpool, in his first 
sermon there, that the soul is the supreme seat of 
authority in religious truth. 

And now " James, a servant of God," is no more, 
but humanly speaking these sermons are for ever- 
more, and I will not leave those out in which the 
theology seemed to be not quite up-to-date, to be 
perhaps of the day before yesterday, and not as 



JAMES MARTINEAU 201 

Israel gathered the manna pearled with the dew 
of that morning. 

The living soul of the man is hidden in their 
heart, and I doubt not at all that if we could 
gather into one congregation, on some one Sun- 
day, those that hold them among their choicest 
treasures in this kind, and not alone of our own 
faith, but from the whole church of the living God 
on the earth, there would be no temple built with 
hands ample enough to hold them. 

But his ministry in the chapel was only one 
chapter in the life of our servant of God in Lon- 
don. The college we glanced at in York, with the 
small band of students, was moved to Manchester, 
and thence in the course of time to the metropolis, 
and there he must teach as he had been taught. 
So we must glance for a moment at his work as the 
head of the college, which, like the church, so far 
as you count heads, was also of kin to the day of 
small things, — so small, indeed, that it gave birth 
one day to a gleam of humor, rather rare, as I 
guess, in Dr. Martineau. When reading in Plato 
the passage where Socrates speaks of having spent 
his life talking philosophy to two or three boys 
in a corner, he remarked : " This must have been 
written with a pre-vision of our college." His 
students also remember gleams of wit and humor, 
when they brought their " efforts " for the mas- 
ter's judgment, and he said of one: " The whole 
duty of man in twenty minutes " ; of another, in 
which the student had wandered away from his 



CLEAR GRIT 

theme, " Very good, but I was waiting for the 
sermon " ; and compared another to a Diorana, 
which moved very fast, but had nobody to explain 
it; while another student said of the master, 
" He is a bad lecturer, for he makes you feel he 
is always right, but it stands to reason that he 
can't be always .^^ 

A small college, I said, but a peerless teacher, 
who won the hearts of the students, and then held 
them close to his own. My dear friend, Brooke 
Herford, who won and held such an eminent place 
in Boston, says that in his first student's year in 
Manchester he would often walk half way to the 
town for a good look at the master's face, as he 
came to the college in the morning, and then turn 
into a side street and run ahead for another look, 
— there was such an uplifting in that pure and 
noble countenance, and that strong confidence in 
the religion of the spirit, which the face alike and 
the word expressed. While many years after this 
Jowett says : " I met Martineau, a noble face 
that might have been worn by some mediaeval 
monk." 

Mr. Herford has paid a lovely tribute to his 
beloved master in a sermon you may have seen, 
and Mr. Cuckson, who succeeded Mr. Her- 
ford as minister of the eminent church in Bos- 
ton, says : " Do you wonder that we reverenced 
and loved him? He helped us to understand 
the reality of God. He enabled us to find the 
rich deposit of truth in human nature, and led 



JAMES MARTINEAU 203 

us to trust in our faculties as the appointed re- 
Yealers of the truth and right. We welcomed 
with a deep gladness the teachings of one who 
clothed the essential truths of religion with a new 
power, established morality on no shifting basis, 
but on the immutable will of God, and harmonized 
Christianity with science and philosophy. His 
face never lost the upward look. He had the eye 
of a prophet, and the inspiration of a poet, and 
his profound reverence for Jesus Christ was strik- 
ing as it was beautiful." 

But I must hasten to a close. The great books 
which hold the living soul of the man for us down 
here went out to the ends of the earth. The mas- 
ters in science, in philosophy, and in religious 
teaching, found in them a master, who must be 
heard and heeded. I can only mention this be- 
cause I have no fitness to enter into the story of 
the grand debate reaching through the many 
years, but a word from his pen in his last great 
book touches, as I think, the marrow of the truth, 
when he says : " Who could ever have imagined 
that religion could be hurt by the discoveries of 
science, had not Christianity been bound up in the 
physics of Moses and Paul, and, looking with fresh 
eyes at the reality, who would not own that we 
live in a more glorious universe than they, that we 
live environed in a sublimer nature, are conscious 
of a more sacred humanity, and own a wider prov- 
idence in human history than was opened to our 
forefathers. Who would demand of a Darwin, blot 



204. CLEAR GRIT 

out your geologic time and take us home again to 
the easy limits of 6000 years? And in the very 
hour of midnight prayer, who would wish to look 
into heavens less deep or be near a God whose pres- 
ence was the living chain of fewer ages ? " 

He said once in a public speech : " The man 
who is a Unitarian and dare not say so is a cow- 
ard and a sneak," and the faith which was only 
budding forth in the chapel and the home, when 
he was born, came to its blossom and fruitage in 
his life, so far prolonged ; and his fame had gone 
out so far and wide, that on his eighty-third 
birthday an address was presented to him, signed 
by six hundred representative men in England, 
Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, Holland and 
America. And in the list you find Tennyson, 
Browning, Jowett, Renan, Phillips Brooks, Max 
Muller, Lecky, Lowell, Lubbock, with many more, 
together with bishops of the Episcopal church in 
England, eminent Scotch Presbyterians, and 
sound English Nonconformists, a noble address, 
of which these are in part the words : — 

" We desire to express to you on this birthday 
the reverence and affection entertained toward 
you, not only by your own communion, but by 
members of other Christian churches, who are ac- 
quainted with your character and works, and by 
many workers in other spheres than that to which 
your life has been devoted. You have taught 
your generation that there are truths above party, 
which cannot be overthrown, for their foundations 



JAMES MARTINEAU 205 

are in the heart of man ; you have shown that there 
may be an inward unity transcending the divi- 
sions of the Christian world, and that the charity 
and sympathy of Christians are not to be Hmited 
to those who bear the name of Christ." 

This was the man with whom I sat for the space 
of half an hour in the summer before last, when 
his long day's work as " James, a servant of God," 
was done, and he was waiting in his Beulah until 
the shining ones came to bid him home. While I 
am so glad of the memory, as he was of the youth 
time, when he would leave the city with the living 
word in his heai-t for those who were waiting in 
the cottages to hear him, and so clasp in his happy 
remembrance for me the ministry of all the years ! 



ROBERT BURNS 

It has been finely said that whatever may be 
our ancestry, we are all proud of Scotland; but 
because we are men, we love Robert Burns, and 
I think it may be said with equal truth that no 
man beside has done so much to make us proud 
of Scotland as this peasant-poet, born of its 
blood and nursed at its breast. Some now here 
will remember how the heart of our Anglo-Saxon 
race was stirred when a hundred years had come 
and gone since he was born, and what hosts came 
together then to think of him and sing of him 
and recall the story of his life. It was about a 
dozen years after this that they celebrated the 
hundred years since the birthday of Scott, the 
one Scottish man of genius we name in the same 
breath. I was in Scotland that summer, and no- 
ticed what endeavor was made to bring forth 
something of an equal significance, and the sig- 
nificance was there, but it took another meaning, 
even in Edinboro', where the traditions of Scott 
are at their best. The radiance resting on Ab- 
botsford burnt low and pale in the light that 
rested on the " auld clay biggin " in Ayrshire, 
and the poet of feudalism could command no 
such homage as the poet of freedom. The man 

who, as our Emerson says, " has endeared the 
206"^ 



ROBERT BURNS 20T 

farmhouse and cottage with their patches and 
poverty, and who stood so high that no man 
could look down on him," — we could look down 
on the sky more easily! 

It is of Robert Burns I am to speak to you, 
and I will begin by saying that when this century 
came in, in the churchyard of St. Michael's at 
Dumfries, in Scotland, we should have found a 
grave all set about with thistles, but should have 
seen at a glance they had not been left to grow 
there by a worthless sexton, because they stood 
like the plants in a garden, separate and clean, 
And while in St. Michael's Church the minister 
would tell you on a Sunday that the thistle is for 
a sign that a curse came once upon the world, 
just there outdoors you would notice these this- 
tles were as tenderly cared for as if they were 
so many slips from the Rose of Sharon. That 
was the grave of Robert Burns. They laid him 
there in what should have been the full, fair prime 
of his days, to the music of the " Dead March in 
Saul," and as the sounds went sobbing back into 
his home, they met the wail of a babe just entering 
the world its father had left. There were five 
little children in the home and hardly a sixpence 
to buy a pound of meal and a bowl of milk to feed 
them; while if death had not taken their father, 
the sheriff wanted him for debt, and the grave 
would have been his only refuge from the jail, 
but for a small sum sent him by a friend in an- 
swer to his pitiful cry. Englishmen and Scotch- 



208 CLEAR GRIT 

men of that day were voting vast sums in pen- 
sions and salaries to no end of people because 
they were descended from the bastard of Charles 
II, and for equally delectable reasons, while that 
royal person, Wellington, — spoken of once as the 
finest gentleman in Europe for about four hours 
in each day, and the greatest blackguard in Eu- 
rope for the other twenty, — this man was draw- 
ing over half a million dollars a year for being 
a great deal meaner and more stupid than his 
father, your friend George III, of blessed memory. 
They had made Burns a ganger on a salary of 
about fifty pounds a year, with some twenty more 
if he could pick it up among the smugglers, and 
for all this he had to travel about 200 miles a 
week on horseback, in all sorts of weather and on 
all sorts of ways, and when he got sick and could 
not attend to the business, they would have re- 
duced his salary by one half, had not another 
man done his work for love's sake and pity. His 
name was Stobie. It falls no more musically on 
the ear, you will notice, than Smith or Collyer; 
but if we should ever meet a Stobie and a Douglas 
together, let us take off our hats to Stobie. 

And when they had laid Burns under the green- 
sward, it seemed not unlikely he would be presently 
forgotten. They did not think it worth their 
while to mark the spot then with a stone. The 
thistles were the only gravestones, until out of her 
poor living, his widow — Bonnie Jean — put up 
a small headstone with his name on it and the 



ROBERT BURNS W9 

days of his birth and death. The truth is that 
his last years were woven of trouble and shame. 
He died of a cold caught when he was drunk, and 
the drink had slain the stamina to fight the cold 
long before this, while there was shame, also, and 
sin of another sort, — more than I shall stop to 
tell; and so they thought, no doubt, it was better 
he should be buried with all his belongings and 
forgotten in a level grave. 

But there was something, still, about this man 
which could not be buried any more than you 
can bury all the sunshine, or all the daisies, or 
all the birds that sing under the blue arches of 
Heaven. 

Noblemen and gentlemen had subscribed for 
one or more books he had printed, and put them, 
probably, where we put ours in such a case. But 
plowmen and milkmaids had spared to buy their 
winter coats and comforters that they might buy 
these books, and as an old man told me once, 
what his father had told him, they had hid them 
in haymows and other unco' places for fear of the 
wrath of the ministers and elders, if it should 
be known they read such wicked books. Then 
in no long time he began to be heard of far and 
wide. He went where the Bible went, and Bun- 
yan, and Shakespeare, among the men of our 
race ; and then, at the end of the hundred years, 
we gathered to celebrate his name hundreds of 
thousands strong all round the world. And when 
the question was asked of an eminent old book- 



210 CLEAR GRIT 

seller in New York, a good many years ago, — 
Mr. McGowan, I believe, on Nassau Street — " Of 
what poet do you sell the most copies ? " he an- 
swered, " Of Burns, beyond all comparison, of 
Burns — more than all the rest put together." 
And so the sins and shames of him might be 
buried, let us hope, and their sepulcher be lost as 
his was who was buried over against Beth-peor 
in Moab ; but never what makes him so dear to 
the great human heart — the songs that enter 
as intimately into the heart of a mouse as of a 
hero, and the psalms such as no man has sung 
beside about the grace and beauty which belongs 
to the life of the rank and file. Burns, to my 
mind, touched a chord nearer to the common 
heart and truer to it than any man who has ever 
felt after its music of our Saxon stock. How 
then could we let him vanish out of our life like 
a candle burnt down to the snuff .^^ It is as nat- 
ural that he should be so near to us, and dear, 
as that the grass should grow in the meadows. 

And touching his life first of all. He was born 
in what we should call a shanty, and as he says, " a 
blast o' Janwar win' blew hansel in on Robin " to 
such a purpose, that the place was like to come 
down on them, and they had to run with him to 
another house for safety and shelter. 

His father was a farmer in a small way, and his 
mother was a poet in this one thing, — she could 
sing the old ballads of Scotland so that, as we 
used to say in the north, " they would fetch a 



ROBERT BURNS 211 

duck out of the water " to hear her. It is told 
of Robert, also, that as he grew up he was rather 
stupid and backward at his books, which was a 
great comfort to another Robert many years ago. 
And old Murdock, the Scotch schoolmaster, used 
to say it was " Gilbert Burns and no' Robert 
that was the boy to make his mark." Yes, and 
Gilbert could make poems in those days, when 
Robert found it hard to make pot-hooks ; " and hoo 
Robert cam to be a poet and Gilbert just nae- 
body by compareeson with Robert was mair than 
even a schoolmaster could tell ye." And Robert 
knew no more about it than old Murdock, and 
no more than Will Shakespeare, the Stratford 
black sheep. There he was, the handsome black- 
eyed boy eating his pariich and his kail, and 
tugging at his books and chores, with the mither 
to cosset him and call him " my bonnie laddie," 
and his father, who could tell him all about thistles 
and daisies and mice and sheep, and always came 
up to him on the hill when he was minding the 
sheep, especially when the thunder was abroad in 
the heavens, and so Burns came in his manhood 
to love the thunder. 

Then the time came to the boy of 17 which 
comes to us all, soon or late. It came when 
he was working in a field one day among the 
reapers, a maid and a youth taking the ridge be- 
tween them as the custom was then. So as they 
went over the land together, the maid began to 
sing an old Scotch ballad, and the boy blushed 



212 CLEAR GRIT 

and said he thought he could write a ballad if she 
would sing it, and then she blushed and said sht 
would try. So the ballad was made, and I think 
this was the first flash out of the dark where it 
lay of this matchless gem of genius in Burns. 
Then the time came when he began to be mastered 
by this genius, and to come under the spell he 
could no more resist than we can resist the roll 
of the planet, while it was when these spells were 
on him the things were done we hold closest in 
our hearts. One incident of this sort must stand 
for my instance of the way the spell would hold 
him. 

He was plowing with four horses one bitter 
day, with John Blanc for his driver, as John 
used to tell the story sixty years after. The 
boy, turning his head, saw a mouse torn out, 
nest and all, by the share, and tossed into the 
wide desolation. Well, John, with a boy's in- 
stinct, " went for the mouse," as we say ; but 
with a swift leap (and a curse, I believe), Burns 
caught him and shook him back to the head of the 
team, and then the old man used to tell how " he 
was-na himsel ony mair that day, but just gaed 
aboot as if he was in a dream," and next morning 
his sister found this in his drawer in the garret : 

" Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie, 
O, what a panic's in thy breastie ! 
Thou need na start awa sae hasty 
Wi' bickerin' brattle! 



ROBERT BURNS 213 

I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee, 
Wi' murderin' pattle ! 

" I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
Has broken Nature's social union, 
And justifies that ill opinion 

Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion 

An' fellow-mortal! 

" I doot na, whyles, but thou may thieve ; 
What then? puir beastie, thou maun live 
A daimen icker in a thrave 

'S a sma' request ; 
I'll get a blessing wi' the lave. 

An' never miss 't! 

" Thy wee-bit hoosie, too, in ruin ! 
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! 
An' naething, now, to big a new ane, 

O' foggage green ! 
An' Bleak December's win's ensuin, 

Baith snell an' keen ! 

" But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 
In proving foresight may be vain : 
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft agley. 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 

For promis'd joy ! 



gl4 CLEAR GRIT 

" Still thoo art blest, compared wi' me ! 
The present only toucheth thee: 
But och ! I backward cast my e'e 

On prospects drear! 
And forward, though I canna see, 

I guess an' fear ! " 

I may add just here that this noble passion of 
tenderness toward all the things that run and fly 
was no mere spasm, born of that winter day. 
Burns could never bear to hunt or shoot anything; 
the only thing he could do of this sort was now and 
then to go a-fishing, but then, I presume he felt as 
all good anglers do, — that this was just as good 
fun for the fish as the fisher. 

Then the times grew very hard for the family. 
The boys had to work hard and live on the poor- 
est fare to make up the rent. The young man's 
head went down and his strong shoulders went 
up, while that fiend took possession of him we 
call dyspepsia. We find it here under the pie 
crust; Burns found it on the bare platter. And 
yet in not much over a year this picture covers 
of the dead-lock with the wolf, the things were done 
(with a few fine exceptions) that make him the 
great poet of the people's heart. They were 
printed in a book ; the book carried the poet to 
Edinboro'. 

Scotland in those times had fallen on evil days. 
Her strong life was like strong land turned back 
into the wilderness, when you have to guess its qual- 



ROBERT BURNS ^15 

ity by the splendor of the weeds. When Burns 
went there, he went where the weeds grew thickest 
for a man of his makeup and his genius. 

" Oh, man," old Girdwood said, the sexton of 
Grayfriars Church, as he tossed a skull out of a 
new-made grave one day, " this was the grandest 
preacher, once, in the toon of Edinboro' ; he would 
drink glass for glass until the hail company were 
under the table deed drunk; and then he would 
gang intil anither room and call the sairvants to 
prayers and discourse to them as if he had na 
had a drop. Oh ! he was a gran' preacher." 

This was the sort of society which was to re- 
ceive Burns in Edinboro'. He was the best man 
there who could drink all the other men blind ; and 
they called it gallantry to seduce women and make 
them almost as base as they were themselves. 
There had always been a broad and open way be- 
tween Edinboro' and Paris since the days of the 
hapless Queen Mary, or before this, and the Scot- 
tish life there had caught the taint without the 
polish of the greater capital. 

Burns never got over that visit to Edinboro', if 
I may judge from all I have heard and read. In 
what he did before this time, I think, the folly was 
more than the sin ; but in what he did after, the sin 
was more than the folly. Before he went to Edin- 
boro' he was still capable of repentance, but after 
he came home the thought touches me that he was 
only capable of remorse. As I follow him up to 
this time, I think there is a certain delicate bloom 



216 CLEAR GRIT 

on his life, as well as on the world he lives in and 
on men and women, " the glory and the freshness 
of a dream," something like the round-eyed won- 
der of a child ; but after this the bloom is lost and 
the curse of knowingness is on him, one of the 
worst poisons in the pharmacy of the pit. 

And then he married Jeanie, too late for mense, 
as he used to say, but too soon for love, got a 
home of his own, and rented a farm on fair terms, 
and the children came apace about his knees. But 
still we hear how he would eat only the simplest 
food there in the home or anywhere else, and would 
never drink under his own roof ; how he taught the 
children also, after his day's work was done, and 
kept up the good old Scottish custom of reading 
to them out of the Bible ; also how his elder son 
said long after that no man could read the Bible 
as his father read it, and he would always sob over 
that matchless threnody, " By the rivers of Baby- 
lon, there we sat down." And again, how he was 
never in the least disturbed when he wrote the 
poems of this later time by the noises of the chil- 
dren about him, and he would always talk to them, 
also, in good broad Scotch, and would forgive 
them anything in the world except a lie. 

Let us turn now to the light and have done with 
the poor broken lantern. Burns sang for Scot- 
land. And starting here, or ending here, the 
genius of Burns always flows at its best from the 
heart of the Scottish peasant and the son of the 
soil, the man of the people who makes the people's 



ROBERT BURNS ^17 

life his own. The man who struck his harp to 
sing of his own native land as the Scottish people 
loved her and clung to her and were proud of her 
grand traditions, when those who were of the rank 
which is only the guinea stamp were doing all 
they could to merge her into the vaster, and in 
some sense, the richer, life of England, — to learn 
her tongue and forget their own, and blot out 
those great traditions as if they were, on the 
whole, not worth minding. This was the feeling 
far and wide among the so-called upper classes 
in Scotland when Bums was growing to his man- 
hood, while still the folks on the land and in the 
workshops held on to their old pride and glory in 
Scotland, and were quite of the mind of one of 
their number who fell into a dispute once on the 
eternal question whether England or Scotland 
could show you the greatest man, so to close the 
question the Englishman said : " Was Shake- 
speare one of your breed .^ Was he a Scotch- 
man? " The canny Scot answered promptly, " I 
dinna feel quite sure aboot that, sir; but his tal- 
ents might weel warrant the infeerence." While 
another Englishman, who was speaking proudly 
of the Battle of the Nile, said: "Do you mind 
what Nelson said — ' England expects every man 
to do his duty,' but he does not mention Scot- 
land." " An' there was na' need," was the quick 
answer, " for he weel knew that Scotland would 
do her duty an' no need to be told." The spirit 
also the poor laborer showed, who went with an 



ms CLEAR GRIT 

Englishman over the battlefield of Bannockburn, 
where they routed us Englishmen root and 
branch, and when the gentleman would have given 
him half-a-crown for his pains, — and Scotchmen 
dearly love half-crowns, — he said, " Nay, nay, 
sir, I winna tak' it ; Bannockburn has cost your 
English folks enough already." " Scotland is a 
place where no Englishman would stay," another 
said to one of these peasants. " Weel, sir," was 
the quick answer, as the Scot pointed to the great 
mounds where our dead lie at Sterling, " it may 
be sae, but there are 30,000 English doon there 
an' not one o' them has wanted to gang back these 
500 years." Or another, who went to England 
and heard a nightingale sing, and when an Eng- 
lishman said, " You hear no such singing-bird as 
that in Scotland," he answered, " I wadna gie the 
whistle of a Scotch curlew for all the nightingales 
ye can find." The whistle of a Scotch curlew, 
by the way, is a sort of cross between a very ag- 
gravating note on the Scotch bagpipes and the 
hoot of a bad boy. Or still one more, who had 
wandered away from Peebles to Paris, and when 
he got home again, said : " Paris is weel enough, 
but gie me Pebbles for pleesur." 

This was the sort of Scotchman we are look- 
ing for, — hard-headed and warm-hearted, cau- 
tious and cannie, douce and braw, pawkie and 
auldfarrant, dowe and thrawn, as the humor might 
take him, and quite ready to agree not sel- 



ROBERT BURNS 219 

dora with one who said to his son, as the old 
man was leaving this world : " John, I bid ye be 
honest, because honesty's the best policy. I ken 
that weel, for I have tried baith." A man, proud 
of his kirk, also, and ready enough to say hard 
things about her, but always ready to take up the 
gauntlet if an outsider said such things in his 
hearing, and nourishing a certain respect for his 
" meenister," as he called him, but always ready 
to rake him over the coals if he saw his fair chance ; 
as, when one of them, who had a very hard grip 
on this world, preached a wonderful sermon about 
Heaven, with her golden streets and gates all 
pearl, and then one of his hearers remarked, when 
they were going home : " I never knew a man so 
deed sure of Heaven as our meenister and so un- 
willing to gang there himseP." Or, when another, 
who had got a boil on his conscience that would 
not let him eat an apple, said so once to another 
of them, his answer was, " 'Deed, sir, it's a pity 
ye had not leeved in the gairden of Eden insteed 
o' Adam, it wad hae saved us a sight o' trouble." 
Or still another, who, when the minister asked him 
what kind of man Adam was, answered : " Weel, 
sir, as near as I can mak' oot he was aboot like 
Joe Simpson, the horse trader ; naebody got ony- 
thing by him, an' a great mony lost." 

Well, it was to this heart, I say, of the very 
noblest peasantry the world has ever known, that 
Burns had to sing, and through theirs to the heart 
of the world. They gave him a noble hearing 



220 CLEAR GRIT 

and a great welcome ; went to the kirk all the 
same, but came home after the kirk scaled to read 
Burns as the truer sermon and psalm. They 
filled the little street on the day when he died in 
Dumfries, workingmen on a week-day, many of 
them weeping, and when a stranger said in won- 
der: "What's the matter?" answered: "Rob- 
bie Burns is deein', sir," and then a wail went up 
from them all. It was because he loved Scotland 
that they loved him and wept for him, who had so 
nobly sung of his love in strains like this: 

" I mind it weel, in early date. 
When I was beardless, young, and blate, 
And first could thrash the barn. 
Or baud a yokin' at the pleugh, 
An' theugh forfoughten sair eneugh. 

Yet unco proud to learn — 
Even then, a wish — I mind its power, — 
A wish that to my latest hour 
Shall strongly heave my breast. 
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake 
Some usefu' plan or book could make. 

Or sing a sang at least. 
The rough burr-thistle spreading wide 

Among the bearded bear, 
I turned the weeder-clips aside, 

And spared the symbol dear. 

No nation, no station 

My envy e'er could raise; 

A Scot still, but blot still, 

I knew nae higher praise." 



ROBERT BURNS 221 

He let the thistle grow among the barley be- 
cause it was the symbol on the grand old Scotch 
banner that had gone through so many battles 
for the nation's freedom from the English thrall. 
The nobility and gentry were willing to see Scot- 
land the tail, shall I say, of England's kite, but 
the Scotchmen to whom Burns sang said : " No ! 
not if it is all to do all over again, we are ready 
for the trial." And so this is the first grand 
stroke, to me, his genius has made. The thing 
that bums and glows in " Scots wha ha' wi' Wal- 
lace bled," and touches his noblest psalm of the 
Scottish life with a matchless beauty and grace, 
as he sings : 

" O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! 

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet con- 
tent ! 
And O ! may Heaven their simple lives prevent 

From Luxury's contagion, weak and vile ! 
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, 
A virtuous populace may rise the while. 
And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved 
Isle." 

It was this love, again, that made Burns sing 
of all things Scotch and in Scotland as the best 
and bonniest anywhere: 

" The blackbird strong, the lint white clear, 
The mavis mild and mellow, 



m2 CLEAR GRIT 

The robin's pensive autumn cheer, 
Through all her locks of yellow, 

The little hare-bells on the lea. 

The stately fox-glove, fair to see. 
And the woodbines hanging merrily." 

The poem to a haggis so caught my own im- 
agination, that, when a fine old Scotch farmer, 
hearing I was to cross the sea in 1871, wrote me 
to come to Scotland and be his guest, I answered: 
" I will come, and will you not whisper to the 
guid wife that I should dearly like to eat a hag- 
gis." 

Well, it was on the table on the day I got there, 
and it was duly eaten, but I have thought since 
that there can hardly be found a more splendid 
proof of the genius of Robert Burns than this 
which lies in his power to so glorify a haggis. 
Yet it was one of the elementary longings to glo- 
rify Scotland that even so deplorable a dish 
should be thought worthy to be set before a king, 
as the compound with that name, a haggis. 

So it is always. He is sure to be at his best 
when he touches Scotland and sings to us, as he 
talked to his children, in guid braid Scotch: 
" The wee bit ingle bhnkin' bonnily " in the " Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night " ; Hallowe'en, with its eter- 
nal charm of laughter, pranks and plays in the 
sheen of the pungent peat fire, and with the great 
Mother Nature clasping all things in the dark 
world to her breast- and Tam O'Shanter; 



ROBERT BURNS 22S 

" When Chapman billies leave the street 
And drouthy neebors meet," etc. 

It is the grand secret of his genius and its key. 
He loved Scotland with his whole heart, and 
thought her peerless fair; loved the life from 
which he sprang, so strong, and tender, and true 
at its best; and loved the poor in their poverty 
deeper even than his own. The gowan on the brae 
he loved, and the heather on the moor, the wild 
things that run and fly, and the very beggars at 
their revels. He held them all in his great and 
most hospitable heart; yes, and the noblemen with 
them, who were noble indeed; and the gentlemen, 
who were gentle indeed ; and the men of my calling 
who were worthy to wear the sacred robes. He 
honored them all, cast over them all the mantle of 
his genius, and made them immortal for all time. 

Let me touch now the life Robert Burns has left 
with its lessons for us all, and see, as we must, 
how it was blended of the noble and the base, the 
ruined and the risen, the life which could never 
come to anything but sorrow and shame, and that 
which will reach up through the ages always to- 
ward the noblest and the best. 

And of the ruined life, first I would say this for 
love's sake, that, hard on him, and bitter as the 
circumstances were, there were circumstances, as 
I would love to believe, stronger than these in the 
man that would have saved him from the sin and 
shame if he had used them as he might ; but he let 



224 CLEAR GRIT 

his will run to willfulness as we may let a fair gar- 
den run to weeds. He was the man who could 
have said *' No " to every devil that tempted him ; 
but the nobler heart in him called, and he refused; 
stretched out her hands and he would not hearken ; 
and then the time came, as he tells us so truly, 
when she wept at his calamity and could help 
him no more, when the need was sorest. 

Robert Burns says to us, out of it all, he could 
have died with " honor, love, obedience, troops 
of friends," and with the blessed sun shining on his 
face lighted with the light that is not of the sun ; 
but he himself made the bed that was so desolate, 
on which he went to sleep. Robert Burns, at his 
best, never tries to lay his sin and shame to the 
circumstances that were so hard on him, but is it 
wrong for me to say what he would not try to say, 
- — that this was a battle in which we can greatly 
pity if we cannot quite vindicate the vanquished 
man? I have done that as I touched the life he 
lived; you have seen what a wretched lot it was he 
was born to and what temptation there was to 
rush out of it into the fool's paradise of strong 
drink. 

But there is another thing one has to notice, 
and that is, there was a good deal more strictness 
than could be good for such a boy and young man 
as Burns was, in his home. There never was a 
kinder father, after his own fashion, than William 
Burns, but he was a natural born Deacon, very 
grave and a little gloomy, and he wanted his boys 



ROBERT BURNS 225 

to be just like himself, sort of infant Deacons 
in good standing, as soon as they began to run. 
It seemed all wrong that they should have much 
pleasure, because he never wanted much himself. 
And so that is to be added to the sum. Gilbert 
Burns could stand it ; Robert could not, or would 
not, and so he crept away, as such boys will, to 
where pleasure was going on, and got it without 
the guardianship of his home, the approval of his 
father, and the sweet smile of his mother upon 
him, and then the boy felt guilty, no doubt, in do- 
ing what he knew his father would disapprove of, 
though it was not wrong in itself, as yet, and this 
led him, at last, entirely wrong. 

That was the way and that is the way now, with 
some of the best fathers to be found, in their own 
way of being good. 

Yet I know not, as I speak to you, that we can 
spare anything out of Burns but this sin and 
shame. The great heart got such mighty things 
out of his death-grip with poverty, for all poor 
men and women to take to theirs — he sang such 
songs of the worth of the poorest if they be but 
honest and true, that it is to me like our grand 
Declaration, set to a music which makes all poor 
men who hear and feel it hold up their heads and 
step out with a surer tread in the upward march 
of humanity. 

But far above all that is sinful and shameful in 
Robert Burns, there shines a genius that is becom- 
ing finer and purer to every new generation. And 



2^6 CLEAR GRIT 

so I will presume to question the canon in his case 
of the greatest of all his brothers, how 

" The evil that men do lives after them, 
The good is oft interred with their bones," 

because it is the good of Burns which lives now, 
and the bad is dying from the feet upwards, a 
line at a time. 

I remember things I read as a boy which I find 
no more in the new editions of his poems ; and 
there were other things, dead by that time, he 
had written and buried in level graves. For this 
is the truth about Burns, — that whatever comes 
out of his pure genius and manhood, as he would 
stand transfigured, touched by the anguish of the 
divine fire, this is ours and always will he , 
while the baser things are turning to dust and 
ashes. 

That great altar-piece, " The Cotter's Satur- 
day Night," is a picture such as Shakespeare 
never dreamed, — of lifting a poor, mean home 
into a light sweeter than ever decked a palace. 
And so I might touch, one by one, these perfect 
flowers of genius which stand so thick and flame 
so sweetly in this rustic peasant's garden, but you 
should know them all as well as I do. How fresh 
they are, as bluebells pearled with dew, and bright 
and breezy, like the shaggy woods of Bonnie Scot- 
land in a fresh June wind. How strong they are, 
also, wrestling with you and mastering you so 
that we weep where Burns wept, and are glad in 



ROBERT BURNS 227 

his gladness and tender in his tenderness. We 
take the mouse to our heart and the limping hare, 
the auld mare, Maggie Maillie with her lamb, and 
with these the great human family, because he was 
so grand, so true a man, and sang so nobly of the 
common things, the common callings and the life 
of the common people. A playwright, a hundred 
years before Burns, said : " I weigh the man, not 
the title. It is not the king's stamp can make the 
metal better, for your lord may be mere dross." 
But Burns caught the idea fresh, as I think, from 
the fountain, and his song stirs the heart like the 
sound of a trumpet and sets us marching, as I 
said, heads up and feet firm, as the answer to the 
music : 

" Is there for honest poverty 
That hings his head, an' a' that.? 
The coward slave, we pass him by — 
We dare be poor for a' that! 
For a' that, an' a' that. 
Our toils obscure, an' a' that, 
The rank is but the guinea's stamp. 
The man's the gowd for a' that. 

" What though on hamely fare we dine. 

Wear hoddin grey, an' a' that? 

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine — 

A man's a man for a' that ! 

For a' that an' a' that. 

Their tinsel show, an' a' that, 



g28 CLEAR GRIT 

The honest man, though e'er so poor, 
Is king o' men for a' that. 

" A prince can mak a belted knight, 

A marquis, duke, an' a' that! 

But an honest man's aboon his might — 

Guid faith, he mauna fa' that! 

For a' that, an' a' that. 

Their dignities, an' a' that. 
The pith o' sense an' pride o' worth. 
Are higher rank than a' that. 

" Then let us pray that come it may, 

(As come it will for a' that). 

That Sense and Worth o'er a' the earth. 

May bear the gree an' a' that ! 

For a' that, an' a' that. 

It's comin' yet for a' that. 

That man to man the world o'er 

Shall brithers be for a' that." 

Burns was born in a land and a time when to 
think freely and tell your thought in religion was 
atheism, and in politics, treason, but the bands 
that lay so heavy on his free soul quickened and 
kindled his genius into some of the grandest 
strains for freedom that ever rang round the 
world. He was taught from his cradle that our 
human nature is utterly depraved, but God's an- 
gels trust not each other with a nobler trust in our 



ROBERT BURNS 229 

humankind than that which filled his soul, and 
loving as few men have loved, fewer still have told 
us what a true love may do to lift us toward the 
highest and the best. 

A peasant man by birth and nurture, deplora- 
bly poor, he has made the world, and Scotland 
especially, richer beyond all price by his genius, 
and, bom into the lap of that grim, forbidding 
time, he has made the time glorious by his advent. 
His nobler manhood makes good men long to grow 
better and bad men in their better moments be 
clean from the sin and shame; and dying, broken 
down by poverty, he has risen again, led captivity 
captive and received gifts for men. Sectarian 
antagonisms grow sweeter as we hear him plead 
for the human brotherhood, and the atheist gulps 
down his sneer as he ponders his words that 

" When in life we're tempest driven 

And conscience but a canker, 
A correspondence fixed wi' heaven 

Is sure a noble anchor." 

And now may we hear our own noble singer, our 
good Quaker poet, as my last and best word for 
Burns : 

" No more these simple flowers belong 

To Scottish maid and lover ; 
Sown in the common soil of song, 

They bloom the wide world over. 



230 CLEAR GRIT 

" In smiles and tears, in sun and showers, 
The minstrel and the heather, 

The deathless singer, and the flowers 
He sang of live together. 

" Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns ! 

The moorland flower and peasant! 
How, at their mention, memory turns 

Her pages old and pleasant. 

" With clearer eyes we see the worth 

Of life among the lowly ; 
The Bible at his Cotter's hearth 

Has made our own more holy. 

" And if at times an evil strain 

To lawless love appealing, 
Broke in upon the sweet refrain 

Of pure and healthful feeling, 

" Still think, while falls the shade between 

The erring one and Heaven, 
That he who loved like Magdalene, 

Like her, may be forgiven. 

" And who his human heart has laid 

To Nature's bosom nearer? 
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid 

To love a tribute dearer? 

" Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time, 
So ' Bonnie Doon ' but tarry ; 

Beat out the Epic's stately rhyme. 
But spare his Highland Mary ! " 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 
A TRUE STORY 

I WANT to say something to you this evening 

about the life of Charles Lamb; and to begin by 

saying, that such a theme must be its own apology 

to those who only know the man through a few 

jests everybody repeats, but which are by no 

means of the deep and searching sort Hazlitt had 

in his mind, when he said, " Lamb's jests scald 

like tears." These jestlings, as he would have 

called them, were the first thing I heard or read 

from him in my youth, and might have been the 

last, had not a gentleman, whose sight was failing, 

asked me to read for him as I found the time ; and 

one of the books he loved best was the " Essays of 

Elia." So I read the essays, I remember, with no 

idea at all of their sweet and subtle charm, and 

wondered how any man could care for such things 

as those. But two or three years after I had 

closed the book for ever, as I thought, some seeds 

it had sown began to quicken in my mind, from here 

and there an essay, and especially those on " Chim- 

ney-Sweeps " and the " Decay of Beggars," and 

made me long to see the book again, after it had 

vanished with its owner, I knew not where. And 

so when I began to rise in the world, and was 

earning as much as eight dollars a month and 
231 



932 CLEAR GRIT 

" found," about the first money I could spare went 
for a copy of " Elia," which is now in a farm- 
house away out in Colorado ; and from that time 
" Elia " has been one of my choicest companions, 
and so dear to me that I can quite understand the 
feeling of as honest and good a man as I ever 
knew, who said to me once, " I love ' Elia ' so well, 
that I feel tempted to carry off every copy I lay 
my hands on." I would not like to say quite so 
much as that about my own feeling, and indeed do 
not think I can love " Elia " so well as my good 
old friend does ; for I notice my own temptation 
seldom strays beyond the desire to borrow every 
copy I find in the hands of my friends, and never 
take it home again. 

But loving the book so well as this even, you 
will not wonder that one should want to know all 
about the author, and find out, as near as may be, 
how that answers to the picture he draws of him- 
self in these essays. 

For you are presently aware, as you read them, 
that the man is holding what one might call an 
experience meeting with you, and that no word 
comes out of his heart blended with laughter and 
tears which has not gone into it first through some 
experience as close as life and death. And I 
found this to be the truth when I came to read the 
story of his life. Here was the man Charles 
Lamb, behind the mask of Elia, not unclothed but 
clothed upon. A man of sorrows and acquainted 
with grief, called to take the noblest part in as 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 2S3 

deep and sad a tragedy as was ever done, and fail- 
ing in no line or accent from the moment when 
the curtain rises to the time it is rung down by 
the hand of death. A man with a few faults, and 
more failings he could confess to with as deep a 
contrition as you will find in the Psalms of David. 
A warning if you will, as Burns was ; but, like 
Burns also, a grand and sweet ensample, and whose 
very vices, as one said who knew and loved him, 
were nobler than some men's virtues. The man 
one thinks of in reading how Luther said once to 
his friend, " Go get drunk, and then you can tell 
me what such sins mean when you have felt their 
teeth in your soul " ; and he of whom Landor sung 
when he was dead, — 

" Cordial old man, what youth was in thy years. 

What wisdom in thy levity, what truth 

In every utterance of that purest soul! 

Few are the spirits of the glorified, 

I'd spring to earlier, at the gate of heaven." 

Charles Lamb died in 1834, as the year was 
closing, at Edmonton by London, a place known 
to you and me through the diverting history of 
John Gilpin. And if we could have gone there in 
the fall of that year, the chances are we should 
have seen Mr. Lamb, as the neighbors called him, 
wandering along the lanes while the leaves were 
turning brown on the trees and the mists were 
falling far and wide ; for the splendid pillars of 
golden fire our maples rear against the azure here 



234 CLEAR GRIT 

are not seen in the mother-land, and if you had 
the maples there, you would not have the azure in 
which ours are framed. A man who looks feeble 
before his time, for he is not yet threescore; and 
with that pathetic student's stoop in the shoulders 
he has not caught, I think, from bending over the 
old folios which were so dear to him, but from 
bending over the great ledgers, rather, in the In- 
dia House, for thirty-three years. He called these 
his " works," these vast folios of profit and loss ; 
and a friend of mine told me how he went to look 
at these ledgers a great many years ago, which 
were shown him with a fine courtesy, and how the 
porter who took them down for him, and dusted 
them, said, " We have had gentlemen from Amer- 
ica before, sir, who wanted to see these ledgers, 
so you will excuse me, sir, for asking if Mr. Lamb 
was an American ? " 

A short and slender person you would have seen 
in those lanes, with what Thomas Hood called a 
pair of immaterial legs ; a head of wonderful 
beauty, if you could see it bare, well set on the 
bent shoulders, with black curly hair in plenty, 
threaded through with gray ; eyes of a soft brown, 
like that you see in some gentle animals, but not 
quite the same color, — odd eyes, you would call 
them ; and a face of the finest Hebrew type rather 
than the Saxon. " But who shall describe his 
face," an old friend says, " or catch its quiver- 
ing sweetness? Deep thought, shot through with 
humor, and lines of suffering wreathed with 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 235 

mirth." He would be dressed in black, also of an 
old fashion, though the time was when he favored a 
decent gray; and when a friend asked him once 
why he wore such queer old clothes, he answered 
very simply, " Because they are all I have, my 
boy." 

He would have a dog with him, also; a creature 
which answered, or rather did not answer, to the 
name of Dash, and would rush away wherever his 
wayward fancy led him, while he who should have 
been his master would stand still in deep dismay, 
calling to him, fearing he would get lost, and re- 
solving to teach him better manners ; only when 
the rogue did return in an hour or so, his victim 
would be so glad he could not bear even to scold 
him, and so he had to send him away at last in 
sheer despair. 

So the gentle old man would walk about the lanes 
in those days, with Dash to torment him; turn in, 
perhaps, to the Bell, where John Gilpin should 
have dined, for a glass of ale ; and then go home 
to the lodgings where he lived with his sister. 

This sister depended on her brother, so that he 
said very tenderly to her one day when he came 
home, " You must die first, Mary " ; and she an- 
swered with a cheerful little laugh, " Yes, Charles, 
I must die first." But on a day not long after, 
as I make out, he fell, as he was walking alone, 
and was much bruised and shaken. He had said 
in a letter, not very long before, " God help me 
when I come to put off these snug relations, and 



^36 CLEAR GRIT 

get abroad in the world to come." And long be- 
fore, " a new state of things staggers me. Sun, 
sky, and breeze, solitary walks and summer holi- 
days, the greenness of fields, and the delicious 
juices of meats and fishes, society and its good 
cheer, candle-l!^ht and fireside conversations, and 
innocent vanities and jests, and irony itself, — do 
we lose these with life.? Can a ghost laugh, or 
shake his gaunt sides? And you, my folios, must 
I part with you.? Must knowledge come to me, if 
it comes at all, by some awkward turn of intuition, 
and no longer by this familiar process of read- 
ing? Shall I enjoy friendship there, wanting the 
smiles and the faces I know, and the sweet assur- 
ance of a look? " 

So he lived, this gentle and sensitive spirit, all 
his life subject to bondage and the fear of death, 
as we have known others live of his noble and deli- 
cate mold. But after he got his hurt he did not 
know what had befallen him, and was only dream- 
ing pleasant dreams of old friends and of some 
little festival he had in his mind ; and so he passed 
away, and did not see death, for God took him, 
while the sister who was to have gone first sur- 
vived him almost twelve years. 

He was born in London, as your fathers were 
blowing at the fires which flamed up at Lexington 
and on Bunker Hill. 

His father was a lawyer's clerk in the Temple, 
where the boy passed the first seven years of his 
life close to the great tides that set in, as he tells 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 237 

us, from the east and west, in the very heart of 
the great city he came to love so well that he told 
Wordsworth once his mountains and lakes might 
hang for all he cared, and, when at last he went 
to look at them, found he was composing his mind 
and staying his heart, not at all on their glory 
and beauty, but on a famous ham and beef shop 
he knew of in the Strand. 

He has drawn a portrait of his father as a man 
of " an incorruptible and losing honesty," and not 
only clerk to the old lawyer, but his good servant, 
dresser, friend, guide, stop-watch, and treasurer. 
The liveliest little fellow breathing, he says, with a 
face as gay as Garrick's ; a man Isaac Walton 
would have loved to go with a-fishing, and clever 
with his hands though he was small. For once 
when he saw a man of quality, so-called, insulting 
a woman, and came to her rescue, and the brute 
drew his sword on him, the little fellow wrenched 
the sword out of his hand, and mauled him soundly 
with the hilt. 

They were very poor, these Lambs ; and the 
undercurrent of rumor, which may go for what it 
is worth, is, that the children were neglected. But 
no word of this comes from Lamb, like those we 
have from another fine humorist, who shames him- 
self and his genius by telling the story of his own 
hard lot as a child, and then draws the portrait of 
his father in Micawber very much after the man* 
ner of one in the Scriptures who mocked at his 
father's weakness and shame. 



238 CLEAR GRIT 

He went to a sort of charity school for his edu- 
cation, Christ's Hospital, so called, a place in 
those days of the old brutal British type, where 
they never spared the rod to spoil the child ; staid 
there seven years, learning what they used to call 
the humanities ; and had for his dear friends and 
companions Coleridge and Jem White, noble boys 
both of them, and dear friends all their lives. Jem 
wrote a book when he grew to be a man, which 
Lamb always said was full of genius. Yet nobody 
would buy it, or read it if they had even a' dic- 
tionary to read instead. But Lamb could never 
understand why the whole world of London did 
not rush right away to buy that book ; and when- 
ever he found a copy in after years on an old book 
stall would buy it for sixpence, — all the man had 
the heart to ask, — and give it to some friend in 
the hope of making one convert at the least to' the 
genius and grace of his old friend, Jem White. 

Coleridge, the inspired charity boy as he calls 
him, had the wine in him which needs no bush, and 
was dear to his heart as Jonathan was to David's. 
He says, to be sure, that Coleridge taught him all 
the corruption he ever knew which had not come 
by nature, likens him to an archangel a little 
damaged, and often wreaks on him the humor that 
scalds like tears. Still their love to the end was 
the fair rose which holds no worm i' the bud, but 
is perfect and entire. 

When Lamb was about fourteen they could af- 
ford to keep him at school no longer; so he had 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 239 

to turn out, and help make the living, for the 
years had brought no release from the bitter pinch 
of poverty. 

There was a brother much older than Charles, 
who was doing well in the world and had only him- 
self to care for; so he only cared for himself, be- 
ing a man of fine tastes, and left the family to its 
doom. 

So he found work to do, the boy of fourteen, and 
became presently the head of the household, and 
its staff and stay. Then in the course of time he 
saw the maid he could dream of as his wife and 
worship from afar until it should please God to 
open the way to his great desire. And then, when 
he was just coming of age, a great tragedy opened, 
and changed the whole plan and purpose of his 
life. They were living in a poor little place, to 
which they had moved for poverty's sake, — the 
old father who was passing into his second child- 
hood, the mother who was an invalid, and help- 
less also, and the sister Mary who was ten years 
older than Charles. Mary was so burdened with 
the care and sorrow of it all, that one day, in a 
sudden fit of insanity, she clutched a knife, and, 
before the brother could reach her, stabbed her 
mother to the heart, wounded the poor old father 
also, and then was secured at a great risk of the 
brother's own life. It was insanity, the jury said 
at once at the inquest; and they knew this better 
than the jury, for Lamb himself had been touched 
by it not long before, and shut up in an asylum. 



MO CLEAR GRIT 

So Mary was sent there for her life, if it must 
be so, but it was found presently that these fits 
were fitful, coming and going with a certain pre- 
monition, when you came to understand them. 
And so she need not stay there, if those to whom 
she belonged would take her home and take care of 
her. The elder brother, who was thirty or so 
then, and well to do, with no one to care for still 
but himself, stood aloof. The youth rising to- 
ward twenty-one, and earning about a hundred 
pounds a year, stepped quietly to the front, and 
said, " I will take care of my sister. Let me have 
her home." 

So she came home ; and the boy turned away 
from the shy, sweet dream of Alice, which had 
nestled in his heart, and took up the burden he 
was to bear for thirty-eight j^^ears to come, and 
wrote presently to a friend, " If Mary and the 
rest of us cannot live on what we have, we deserve 
to burn at a slow fire; and I almost would sooner 
do that than let her go back to the asylum." 

So they lived on what they had, until more 
came through the young man's steady striving, 
and the better berth he got in that India House. 
For he says, " I am jealous of human helps and 
leaning-places ; and small treasures, as good John 
Woolman hath it, are enough to a contented 
mind." He burned the journal he had kept about 
his sweet, shy love, and the poems he had written 
to his divinity but had never sent. 

The poor old man, his father, needed to be 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 241 

amused; and so he gave up the company of Cole- 
ridge of evenings, to amuse him, — the choicest 
company to Lamb in all the world; yet did not 
think it was a great thing to do, for this poor old 
dotard was his father. " And indeed," the young 
man says when he begins to be a bit cheerful 
again, " the wind is tempered beautifully to the 
shorn Lambs." 

And twenty years after this he says, speaking 
of Mary and himself, " We two house together, 
old bachelor and old maid, in a sort of singleness ; 
while I, for one, find no disposition to go out upon 
the mountains with the king's rash offspring, to 
bewail my celibacy. And we agree very well, too ; 
but once when I spoke to her in a kinder voice than 
usual, she burst into tears, and said I was much 
altered (for the worse). I read my old Burton, 
and she reads stories with plenty of life in them, 
good and bad. She hath also been much cast 
among free thinkers ; but that which was good and 
venerable to her in her childhood she loves still, 
and will play no tricks with her understanding or 
her heart." 

So it came to pass, when the old father and 
Hester, the servant, were dead, and they were left 
alone, that the cross would change now and then 
into a crown, and joy take the place of the deep 
sorrow, which indeed was hidden away by those 
who knew of it and loved them, and was never 
mentioned again until they were both dead. Mary 
Lamb also was a woman of rare and beautiful 



U2 CLEAR GRIT 

gifts. Hazlitt says she was the only woman he 
ever met who knew how to reason; but HazHtt's 
experience of women was not fortunate. Words- 
worth, with a finer ear, says, " I dwell not only on 
her genius, but on her rare delicacy and refine- 
ment." 

They kept house together, and knew how to 
do this on a little, until more came to hand, as I 
said; and Mary knew what her brother loved to 
eat, and how he liked to have it done. And Cole- 
ridge — the archangel more than somewhat dam- 
aged by this time — clung to the brother and the 
sister, and they to him ; so did Jem White, whose 
death, Lamb says, took half the fun out of the 
world and the sunshine. 

George Dyer also, simple as a child, to whom 
Lamb once whispered the great secret that as likely 
a man as the prince regent was the author of the 
Waverley stories, and George went and told Leigh 
Hunt also as a great secret ; for in these freaks 
of humor, Lamb, who was the very soul of truth 
and honor, used to say, " I am not a matter of 
f-fact man, but a matter of 1-lie man," and argued 
once that the truth was too good to be thrown 
away on everybody. 

And Bowles was their dear friend, who pre- 
sented a Bible once to another friend with the in- 
scription, " From the author, with his kind re- 
gards." And a schoolmaster, of whose school 
Lamb took charge once when the pedagogue had 
to go away and did not know what in the world he 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB MS 

should do for a teacher. Lamb did not know what 
he should do as a teacher when he had got into the 
desk, so he gave the boys a whole holiday to their 
vast delight. And an artist, who had to get out a 
series of portraits of great admirals for a maga- 
zine, but could not afford to hire a sitter; so 
Lamb sat for the whole lot, which are still to be 
found with faces more or less of the Hebrew type. 
And a poor fellow, to whom Lamb said with a 
blush, when he was getting to be easy about 
money, " Do you know, my boy, I have made my 
will, and put you down for so much, so I might 
just as well pay it now." Barry Cornwall also, a 
young man then, and not over well-to-do, was 
very dear to him. He was looking much cast 
down one day ; and Lamb, suspecting it was 
money, or rather the lack of it, which troubled 
him, said, " Barry, my desk is all a maze of things 
I don't want, and there's a hundred pounds among 
'em. Do take it, my boy, and relieve me of the 
care." 

All the men he met, who had a queer twist in 
life or mind or fortune, went into his heart, and 
staid there; and all the men he heard or read of, 
no one else would entertain with so much as the 
crumbs of their sympathy. He had a good word 
for Judas Iscariot, and pity for the man in the 
great sermon who built his house upon the sand, 
and for the five foolish virgins ; but did not care 
much for the man who built his house on the rock, 
because it was clear he knew how to take care of 



244 CLEAR GRIT 

himself, or for the five wise virgins who went in 
merrily to the supper, and left their companions 
weeping outside in the dark; while he was not 
quite clear that there was not a certain grain of 
nobility in Guy Fawkes, that arch-traitor who 
would have blown up king, lords, and commons at 
one stroke ; and had great pity also for a man he 
read of in the papers, who was taken up for sheep- 
stealing, because the sheep was taken too, and so 
the poor man lost his first and last chance at a 
mutton-pie. And Lamb imagined, moreover, what 
a fearful thing it would be, if, when his grace of 
Clarence had made his choice to be drowned in a 
butt of malmsey, it should not turn out to be that 
after all, but some other sort of wine. 

One who was his friend and is ours sings: 

" There is no music in the life 
That sounds with empty laughter wholly; 
There's not a string attuned to mirth. 
But has its chord in melancholy." 

Well, this is the secret of the humor which 
scalds like tears. The wind was tempered to the 
shorn Lambs, but now and then it smote them 
very sore. Mary was never cured from that awful 
threat of insanity which went and came, while the 
shadow staid always on their house and life. So 
he could not leave her when he would take a holi- 
day ; it was so shameful, he said, to leave her, and 
go off and enjoy himself alone. So Mary would 
pack her trunk and go with him, and always 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB U5 

packed her strait-waistcoat to be ready for what 
might happen. And if they were at home they 
knew when the shadows began to deepen; and like 
those children in the story we have all wept over 
in our day, it would befall, that 

" When they saw the darksome night. 
They sat them down and cried." 

Then the brother would busk himself up bravely 
in his best, put on airs as of one who was on 
pleasure bent, and ask for a holiday; and I think 
they were delicate with him, and wise, and asked 
no questions. Then he would go home to Mary, 
and friends say they have met them stealing along 
by-paths toward the asylum, hand in hand, and 
weeping both of them, while Charles would be 
carrying the strait- jacket, and sometimes Mary 
would urge him to a run on those small immaterial 
legs, for she was aware that it might be midnight 
madness in a few moments, and so they would come 
to the doors quite out of breath. Then Mary 
would get well again, come home, and begin her 
housekeeping as if nothing had befallen. And in 
the Temple once, when they had taken rooms there, 
they lighted on a bit of rare good fortune Lamb 
would enjoy above all men. It was a small place 
and cheap ; and mousing round they found a blind 
door, locked fast, managed to open the door, and 
then found some rooms beyond, nobody had ever 
heard of or suspected, took possession of these also, 
and so lived in great state, and were never able to 



M6 CLEAR GRIT 

pay any rent for them because they could not find 
any landlord to take it. 

This is the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, 
until at last on a day we see the old man in the 
lanes by Edmonton with his dog Dash, and then 
sitting by the fire of an evening, listening to his 
old host who always told the same old story of the 
way he rode into Salisbury in his rash youth on a 
mad horse ; as grand and touching a story — not 
as I tell it, but as the brother and sister lived it — 
as was ever written with a pen ; the story of the 
boy and man, — 

" Whom neither shape of danger could dismay, 
Nor dream of tender happiness betray ; 
Who, doomed to walk in company with pain, 
Turned the necessity to glorious gain." 

I may say something to you on another occasion 
about good books ; I name Charles Lamb's essays 
and letters, and the story of his life, now, among 
the best. You may not be of my mind at once, 
about the essays, as I was not of my friend's mind. 
But if once you catch his secret, and wander with 
him wherever the humor takes him, watching the 
life he touches with a sympathy something like 
his own, a life which never breaks forth into the 
bluff and hearty freedom you find here and there 
in Shakespeare, when laughter is lord of the day; 
and is never " dipped in baths of hissing tears, or 
riven with the shocks of doom," for this would be 
barking too near his own experience, but is re- 



CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 247 

plete with quaint humor and wisdom, deep as the 
deepness of life, — if you can do this, you will read 
Charles Lamb to your heart's delight; not now in 
your youth alone, but in your old age. 



CHARLES LAMB: 
GENIUS AND HUMOR 

In my lecture last Sunday evening I tried to 

touch the life of Charles Lamb from his cradle 

in the Temple Court in London to his grave in 

the old Church Yard at Edmonton, and to dwell 

with some minuteness on the terrible tragedy 

which struck his forlorn little home as he was 

just reaching his manhood and dreaming a young 

man's happy dreams of a home of his own 

in no long time, with Alice Winn, if we may 

guess at her full name, for his wife — the girl 

whose blue eyes and golden hair of the true wind 

flower, as I take it, he would see now and then 

in some rare picture and speak of with a delicate 

safeguard cast about his secret, when he was 

drawing on toward old age; a home of his own 

with Alice for his helpmeet, and those children 

he would dream of who were never born because 

of the great tragedy, but lived all the same in his 

heart and peopled the little parlor hung round 

with prints by Hogarth, and the den, smelling 

so strong of tobacco, and the old folios he would 

kiss now and then and tell you what rare bargains 

they were when he bought them; or, if he could 

not afford the outlay when he was poor, would 
248 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR 249 

tell some friend where to find the treasure because, 
as he says, " the next pleasure to buying a bar- 
gain for one's self is persuading a friend to buy 
it. It tickles one with the image of an impru- 
dency without the penalty." 

They were never bom, but in twenty-five years 
after he had given up his hope of a home like that, 
and was living with his poor sister, as we heard, 
in a sort of double singleness, he would fall into 
a reverie and see them sitting there — two dream 
children, Alice again, and John, named after his 
brother. " They crept about me the other even- 
ing," he says, " to hear about their great grand- 
mother who lived in Norfolk in a great house and 
knew all the psaltery by heart and a deal of the 
New Testament, and was the best dancer in the 
county. How I would go to see her when I was 
a little boy and slept in the very same chamber 
where the babes slept the bad uncle left in the 
woods to die, and how they used to walk down 
the great staircase hand in hand — two little 
ghosts the servants said, but I never saw them 
myself. And then I noticed my boy, who had 
been somewhat scared, expanded all his eyebrows 
and put on a look of courage. And about my 
brother who died and how I missed his kindness 
and missed his crossness and wished he were alive 
again that I might quarrel with him rather than 
not have him back. And then, because they 
wanted to hear about their dear dead mother I 
told them how I had courted her seven long years, 



250 CLEAR GRIT 

and, as much as they could understand, what coy- 
ness and denial meant in maidens, when turning 
to Alice the soul of the first Alice looked out at 
her eyes with such a reality of representment that 
I became in doubt which of them stood before me 
or whose that bright hair was. And while I sat 
gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter 
to my view, and I heard no speech but only the 
effects of speech whispering to me : ' We are not 
of Alice nor of thee, we are not children at all. 
We are only what might have been.' And so 
awaking I found myself seated in my batchelor 
armchair with the faithful Bridget sitting un- 
changed by my side." 

There is a companion picture to this we have all 
read also who read Elia, in which one of these 
child angels, as he calls them, is born. But 
whence it came or how it came or who bid it come, 
or whether it came purely of its own head, no 
one knows. Nor were there wanting bowls of that 
cheering nectar mortals call caudle when the child 
angel was born, or the faces of women well stricken 
in years, so dexterous were the angels to counter- 
feit the kindly similitudes of earth. And the 
babe did not taste death because it was an angel, 
but it was to know weakness and reliance, and as 
it grew up it went with a lame gait; and pity 
sprang up in angelic bosoms and yearning like the 
human touched them at the sight of the little one 
who was lame. 

We were watching the young man last Sun- 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR 251 

day evening standing face to face with the great 
tragedy and saying to himself, " The happy 
dream is over and I must take care now of my 
poor sister and my old father while he lives, burn 
the journal to Alice, and the pretty sonnets, and 
be as a root out of a dry ground." I want to say 
now that we can never understand what such a 
resolution cost him except as we read between the 
lines of these papers in Elia, Dream Children and 
The Child Angel, that I am glad to touch also 
for proof of his sweeter and more subtle genius. 
They are the children who might have come to 
him in his home but for the great woe that fell 
on his fair youth. 

It makes some men coarse and hard again to 
give up the happy dreams of their youth and 
present their bodies, as Paul says, a living sac- 
rifice, but you have to notice how it makes Charles 
Lamb more tender and gracious and so wide in 
his sympathy and charity that his best friends 
were at a loss what to make of him, and would 
shake their wise heads and wonder what he would 
say or do next. 

It was Lamb who first said that searching thing 
so many get the credit for now, as he walked 
through an old churchyard when he was a child 
and read the epitaphs, " Mary, where are all the 
bad people buried? " It was about as hard for 
him when he began to feel his way into our life 
to find out where the bad people lived and the bad 
things. Burns, among the poets, he tells us, was 



25^ CLEAR GRIT 

in those days the God of his idolatry — he did not 
like Byron — and touched as we have all been 
by the beautiful sympathy he found in the poet of 
his choice with the dumb creatures about us, he 
says he would like to try his hand at such work 
himself and write poems on toads and things of 
that sort everybody hated, and would set the lob- 
ster talking of his experience to the cook, and 
round up the series with a poem on snakes which 
should end with an apology for their poison, made, 
of course, by the snake himself, who must be his 
own best advocate. And friends remember also 
how there was a nice bit of lawn on their little 
place at Enfield, at which the donkeys who had 
to live on the very short commons of the Com- 
mons outside would look wistfully wagging their 
poor ears back and forth and sideways, as if they 
were saying, " It's so sad to let ' I dare not wait 
upon I would, like the cat i' the adage.' " And 
how Charles, sitting at dinner with them one day, 
saw a pair of these eloquent ears over the gate, 
sat up and went out, lifted the latch and let the 
donkey into paradise, and then came back to fin- 
ish his dinner and his talk. 

And as it was with the dumb things and evil, 
as we count them, so it was again with our hu- 
man kind. We can see now what they did not 
quite see then who loved him best, that there was 
no company on the earth too good for so rare a 
spirit. He did not think of this at all, as it 
seems to me, but opened his heart wide, made the 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR ^53 

whole world welcome and then found none too 
bad for his sympathy or his pity. 

It is told by Hazlitt that on an evening when 
there was a noble conversation on persons one 
would wish to have seen, and Shakespeare's name 
of course stood first, Lamb stammered out when 
the rest were through, with a mist in his wonderful 

eyes, " There — is — one m-man — more. If 

Shakespeare was to come into the room we should 
all arise — to meet — him. But if That Per- 
son — should — come — into it, we shall all fall 
down and k-kiss the hem of his garment." It was 
the same great heart of pity and sympathy for 
the meanest and least He nourished which was in 
this Lamb of the new age. When a young lady 
was staying with them once and was making some 
clothes for the babe of a poor Gypsy whose hus- 
band was under sentence for sheep stealing, he 
begged she would go and see her too, and take 
the things herself, for fear the poor fellow's wife 
might imagine she had heard of her misfortune 
and was ashamed to go near her, and added with 
his good smile, " I feel a good deal of sympathy 
for a sheep stealer." He heard some friends tell- 
ing of a very decent young fellow who had run 
off with a girl a good way above his station and 
how her father would not forgive her ; so they had 
gone to keep a tavern near by and drew the in- 
ference that it served them right. " Where's the 
tavern ? " Lamb said. " We will buy our beer of 
'em." He saw a lot of very poor and very 



254 CLEAR GRIT 

hungry children one day looking into a cake shop 
as if they would like to lick the window panes, 
went in, loaded himself with cakes and came out, 
stuttering, " Here we are, who speaks first? " 
They all spoke first when the shock of wonder was 
over, and he distributed his load. 

He was in company the evening after Faunt- 
leroy was hung, whose crime and execution had 
made a great noise in London, and they were talk- 
ing about this advertisement they had seen in a 
morning paper : " All good Christians pray for 
the rest of the soul of Fauntleroy." What did 
such a thing mean in Protestant England? Was 
the man a Roman Catholic? and so on. " Do you 
know anything about it, Charles? " Coleridge said 
at last. " I should think I do," Lamb answered, 
" I paid s-s-seven and s-s-sixpence to put it in." 

He says the greatest pleasure in life is to do 
good by stealth and then get found out, but those 
who knew him best had only a faint idea after all 
of his wide and far more than royal charities. 
A good friend of mine said once, " The Lord has 
tried me fairly, as I think, with poverty and 
knows just about what I can do in that direction. 
Now if he would only try me with riches he would 
know what I can do all round." He was never 
tried with riches — this rare man we are looking 
at — but he had enough at last and to spare, yet 
spared still for this noble spending. And when 
they smiled at his old coat and said, " Charles, 
why do you wear it? ", he was making it do six 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR 255 

months longer that he might get an old friend 
out of trouble. The mean poor who found him 
out stuck to him like the mother of the horse 
leeches and were forever crying " Give, Give " ; 
and his friends would say " Charles, why do you 
give them your money that way? " He only an- 
swered, " What will they do if I give them up ? ", 
and never found the answer to that question. He 
knew all the sights of London by heart, too, and 
when he got the time would trot away in a vast 
delight with the children of his old friends to see 
the sights, and when at last they lighted on 
master Punch, the bravest show of all, would sit 
down on a doorstep with them, pay the man to 
begin at the very beginning and work the play out 
to the very end. And so it must have been through 
the impulse to laugh he felt so like crying that 
when the good woman was praising her children, 
as good women will now and then, and men not 
so good their grandchildren, and she said, " Mr. 
Lamb, do you not like the children ? " he an- 
swered, " B-boiled, ma'm." And through the 
great heart in him, that would have none so good 
as to make the rest seem bad by contrast, that 
when another woman was belauding her minister to 
the skies — bless him — Lamb stuttered, " Well, 
I say — ," using quite another word I will not re- 
peat, " I say — at a venture." And when one 
day he was saying all sorts of hard things about 
a man he had heard of and a friend said, " Charles, 
how can you talk so? You never met the man in 



256 CLEAR GRIT 

your life," answered " that's just the reason. If 
I had met him it would be all over with me and I 
should like him right away." 

And this is to me the grand secret of the genius 
of Charles Lamb. This deep and whole sympathy 
with all sorts and conditions of men and things 
the most of us dislike or deplore put a touch of 
regret into the fact that he should be ashamed 
to look at a monkey because he was such a very 
poor relation, he said, and brought up queer im- 
ages of what other dumb creatures might be taught 
to do in time, such as that of an elephant check- 
ing his own trunk. He said once, " In this age of 
widespread infidelity, when we imagine everything 
going wrong, I love to hear the omnibus men 
shouting, ' All right,' as the people get out and 
in. They mean more than they think ; it is a 
wisdom crying out in the streets, as it were. I 
like to hear that cry." 

Which brings up the love he nourished for Lon- 
don and that made it the one matchless town in 
all the world to him and indeed the one match- 
less place. " I have a mind," he said, " which 
loves to be at home in crowds. London's lamps 
lit o' nights, her goldsmiths, print shops, toy shops, 
and pastry cooks, St. Paul's churchyard and the 
Strand. The man must have a rare recipe for 
melancholy who can be dull in Fleet Street. 
Often when I have felt a weariness and distaste 
at home I have rushed out into the Strand," he 
says, " and fed my humour till the tears have wet- 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR 257 

ted my cheeks for unutterable sympathies with the 
multitudinous and moving picture she never fails 
to present at all hours. Her very deformities," 
he cries, " do not displease me ; I gladly behold 
every appetite supplied with its proper food; I 
perceive urbanity where other men discern mean- 
ness ; I love the very smoke of London ; all her 
streets are paved with gold to me, or else I know 
of an alchemy which can turn her very mud into 
that fine metal. I like to meet a chimney sweep," 
he says, " not an old sweep, but one of those 
tender novices with maternal washings not quite 
effaced from the cheek; I have a kindly yearning 
towards these dim specks and innocent black- 
nesses, these young Africans of our own growth, 
these almost clergy imps, who sport their cloth 
without assumption, and from their little pulpits, 
the tops of chimneys, in the nipping air of a 
December morning preach their lesson of patience 
to mankind. Reader, if thou meetest one of these 
small gentry in thy morning rambles, it is good 
to give him a penny; it is better to give him two 
pence. I am by nature extremely susceptible of 
street affronts, yet I can endure the jocularity 
of a young sweep with something more than for- 
giveness. In the last winter but one, pacing along 
Cheapside, a treacherous slide brought me down 
on my back. I scrambled up with pain enough, 
trying to look as if nothing had happened, when 
the roguish grin of one of these young wits en- 
countered me, and there he stands still in my mind 



258 CLEAR GRIT 

with a maximum of glee and a minimum of mis- 
chief in his mirth, so that I could have been con- 
tent, if the honor of a gentleman might endure it, 
to see him laugh till midnight." And then he 
tells the story of the rare supper Jem White gave 
all the young sweeps once, the one lovely idyll of 
their sad dark life. And his complaint of the de- 
cay of beggars in London I have no room to 
quote from but only to commend to those who have 
no knowledge of its wonderful deep charity, and 
the humor which lurks in almost every line, 
and many an essay beside is full of this large and 
beautiful insight into this life of ours in great 
cities and the good which abides forever in the 
heart of the evil. It is twofold, therefore, this 
genius of Charles Lamb — sympathy, first with 
our human life, and second, with the great city 
where he found that life most potent and imperial, 
both for good and evil. And so if I may slip 
in a moral just here, it is this, that I know of no 
man in modern times — no man since Shakespeare 
indeed — whose genius holds a finer treasure than 
the " Essays of Elia " for the dwellers in great 
cities who would nourish noble thoughts of them 
rather than the mean thoughts so many do nourish, 
and that charity toward our fellows who make us 
sore now and then by overdose contact, that char- 
ity which beareth all things, believeth all things, 
hopeth all things, endureth all things, and never 
faileth. 

His story I told in part last Sunday night. It 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR 259 

must now be finished, or rather, shall I say, filled 
in. He began to write the letters we all love who 
know him, first, and then in no long time to try 
his hand at bits of poetry which grew pale in 
the radiance of his matchless prose and can never 
be more than the shadow to its light. And like 
most men of the rarest gifts he had to wait for 
his audience and indeed had to die before the 
world was half aware of the worth of what he had 
done. So you must not be disheartened whose 
very bones ache to be heard of men but find few 
to hear you. Our own Willis says he met Lamb 
when his best work, as I make out, was done, and 
told him how he had bought a copy of Elia the 
last day he was in America. " And what did you 
give for it? " Lamb said. " Seven and sixpence," 
was the answer, and then Lamb began to count 
out the money on the table, begging Willis to take 
it, because he never wrote anything yet that 
would sell. " My last poem," he stuttered, 
" won't sell a copy. Have you seen it, Mr. 
Willis ? " " No," was the answer. " Well, now, 
it's only eighteen pence and I will give you six 
pence toward the price if you will buy it." 

He wrote the little play you have all heard of, 
and was delighted beyond measure when it was 
accepted. It must be good because the managers 
were the best judges and it would not do for the 
author to affect a false modesty and so he won- 
dered how he would have the tickets printed he 
wanted to give to his friends through the long sue- 



260 CLEAR GRIT 

cession of nights it would be sure to run. He got 
good front seats for himself and Mary to enjoy 
the splendid oration, joined with the crowd in in- 
sisting on the first encore, and waited for the au- 
dience to begin to applaud in good earnest, found 
before very long they were beginning to hiss and 
hoot, and then, when that grew fast and furious, 
turned in, with Mary to help him, and hissed 
and hooted his own play with the utmost fervor, 
because if he didn't they might think he was a 
friend of the author, and then told the story with 
such a wealth of humor that you feel always like 
thanking the gods in the galleries for turning 
the playhouse that evening into a " Bedlam." 

There were two shadows beside those I have 
touched, crossing the light that shone for him 
when the sad days would pass away with Mary's 
recovery. He was so delicate that a very little 
drink was too much, but he could not give it up, 
or would not, and liked also his pipe of tobacco, 
or rather too many pipes, and would smoke with 
such a cloud about him that when Dr. Parr, who 
was also a diligent smoker, said, " Mr. Lamb, 
how can you do it?" he answered, ''I toil after 
it. Doctor, as some men toil after virtue." He 
said in his better moments, " Smoking stands in its 
own light," and felt he could write a poem on its 
virtue if it did not give him such a headache, and 
wants to know Coleridge's average noonday opin- 
ion about it, not his morning opinion, because he 
always makes up his mind in a morning not to 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR 261 

smoke, or his evening opinion because he always 
feels he must smoke then and thinks his friend 
will be of the same mind. It is not so with the 
drink. This he deplores, and tells young men of 
its curse in a strain so deep and solemn that I do 
not know where to look for so strong and tender 
a sermon on this theme as you will find in his 
confessions of a drunkard. 

But in spite of this there was no such man in 
London for thirty years as Charles Lamb, to my 
own mind. No man so' wide in his sympathy, so 
pure and sweet in his charity, so simple of heart 
and gentle, so steadfast in his purpose to forget 
himself for others, and professing no faith after 
he drifted away in some sense from ours, no man 
who would bow down in his heart more sweetly 
and kiss the hem of the garment of That Person 
he was shy of naming otherwise, who said, 
" Neither do I condemn thee ; go and sin no more." 
And in those thirty years there was no place in 
London where you would be apt to find such good 
company or to hear noble conversation flashing and 
gleaming with wit as in his shabby little rooms 
in which he would say that they were contented 
with little but wishing for more. Those say who 
lived down to our own time, and one or two who 
are still living, that no report could ever be made 
of those evenings when their host was free from 
the burden and would back some bright thing by 
the remark, " Ben Jonson said worse things than 
that, my boy, and b-better," or plead with Man- 



262 CLEAR GRIT 

ning not to go among the savages on the ground 
that they would probably eat him and add to 
their cruelty the cool malignity of pepper and 
vinegar. 

The talk cannot be reported and the genius and 
humor which lie in his essays and letters cannot 
be dissected or even transferred to a discourse 
like this of mine. It was my purpose at the out- 
set to try to do this, but I noticed that I was 
marring the rare beauty and completeness of the 
essays I touched. It was as if you should cut a 
face from some rare picture and say " Look at 
that," or show the fragment of a rare marble. I 
may try again sometime to speak of some of the 
essays. It will only be as if you should patch 
cloth of gold with serge. Two years ago about 
this time I made discourse about good books and 
said I would name some of the best as they came 
to me — books you can put on a shelf or two and 
feel you are rich beyond any man you can name 
who has not learned to love the best. I name 
Charles Lamb's among them and among the first. 
You may not be of my mind, as I was not of my 
blind friend's mind, or you may never be of my 
mind, for Lamb still has his own audience. But 
if once you catch his secret and wander with him 
wherever the humor takes him, watching the life 
he opens to you with a heart somewhat like his 
own — a life which never breaks forth into the 
bluff and hearty freedom you find here and there 
in Shakespeare, where laughter is lord of the day, 



LAMB: GENIUS AND HUMOR ^63 

and is never flooded with the noontide sunshine 
or dipped in baths of hissing tears or riven with 
shocks of doom (for this would be harking too 
near his own experience) but is full of the sweet 
golden light of our October days rather, when the 
haze falls, or clouded with the gray fleeces that 
still have mostly a silver lining — if you can do 
this you will find such treasures as I know not 
where to look for otherwheres and know what is in 
his good heart when he sings : 

" It were unwisely done should we refuse 
To cheer our paths as featly as we may, 
Our onward path to cheer, as travelers use, 
With merry song, quaint tale or roundelay. 
And we will sometimes talk our troubles o'er, 
Of mercies shown and all our sickness healed. 
And in his judgments, God remembering, love, 
And we will learn to praise Him evermore." 



HAWTHORNE 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, the raciest name in 
American letters, was born in the queer old city 
of Salem he has made so mysterious and yet so 
familiar to us through his writings. He came of 
an old sea-faring race that, time out of mind, had 
left their home, gone to sea, and risen through 
storm and shine to the rank of captain, and then, 
at last, had come back for good and all to the old 
place, to die. 

The father of Hawthorne was a sailor, the last 
of the line that followed the sea ; he died when 
Nathaniel was six years old. His mother, after 
this, carried the boy into Maine, and sent him, in 
due time, to college, where he had Longfellow, the 
prince of our poets, and Franklin Pierce, for 
classmates, and whence, also, he graduated. 

And then, as if Nature would be avenged for all 
the gadding about of all the Hawthornes, he re- 
tired into a seclusion so deep as to be seldom seen, 
even in his own family circle; wrote wild tales, 
also, on which he had no more mercy than the old 
Hawthornes had for the witches, for he burnt them, 
and printed a romance in Boston in 1832 of which 
no man knoweth the sepulcher unto this day; sat 
at the receipt of customs, under Mr. Bancroft, on 



HAWTHORNE 265 

the Long Wharf in Boston, and there showed 
enough of the salt to make him a favorite with 
the sailors ; but went out of that, when Harrison 
set up his log cabin, into the Brook farm experi- 
ment, the mother-bird of his " Blithedale Ro- 
mance " ; married when he was forty and went to 
live in that old manse at Concord, of whose mosses 
he has preserved such exquisite specimens. 

Then the new wave of democracy that carried 
Polk into the White House carried Hawthorne 
into the Custom House at Salem ; but when the 
Whigs divided the spoils, they snatched Haw- 
thorne's bit of loaf among the rest. But in 1853 
Franklin Pierce made him Consul at Liverpool, 
the best thing he had in his gift. 

Then in 1857 this was done with, and after some 
travel on the Continent of Europe Hawthorne 
came home to die. And so, on one of the softest 
and sweetest May-days that ever breathed over 
New England, with apple-blossoms from the or- 
chard of the Old Manse and his last manuscript 
laid on his coffin, he was buried with floods of sun- 
shine about him, on the crowning eminence of the 
beautiful cemetery at Concord, with a multitude of 
New England's children standing about his dust, 
while James Freeman Clarke, his dear friend of 
many years, said words of hope and consolation 
to the weepers at the grave. For in the years 
that had come and gone since his still-born ro- 
mance was buried in a level grave in Boston, Haw- 
thorne had done better things than acting as 



266 CLEAR GRIT 

tide-waiter to a political party. He had written 
some books of a quality and flavor as separate and 
unique and rare as " The Heart of Mid-Lothian " 
or " Adam Bede," and had done more than any 
other man, I suppose, except Emerson, to estab- 
lish our claim to a literature of our own — some- 
thing really smacking of our own sun and soil — 
the true wine of the American vintage. And the 
reason for this lies in the fact that Hawthorne 
was, in the purest sense, no doubt, a man of 
genius. Yet I am aware, when I say this, that few 
things are more difficult than to tell what genius 
really is. " It is common sense, intensified," says 
one ; " it is the power to make vast effort on long 
lines," says another. " It is unconquerable pa- 
tience," BufFon says ; and John Forster tells us : 
" It is the faculty to light your own fire." " It 
is a mind of large powers accidentally determined 
in some particular direction," says ponderous, 
six-syllabled Samuel Johnson ; and so on indefi- 
nitely, as it was all things to all men. 

But I think one thing in the genius for litera- 
ture is that which will never let the book, which is 
full of genius, lose its novelty. It is the greatest 
thing a man can do, also, and yet that which he 
does most spontaneously, " never cackling over his 
effort," as Carlyle says, and never wondering why 
all the world does not wonder at it when the thing 
is done. 

It is related of George the Fourth, of England, 
that he had some wine of a wonderful quality he 



HAWTHORNE 267 

treasured for rare occasions befitting a king. His 
butler, supposing the occasion would .never come, 
drank the wine, and then it did come, and word 
was given that the wine must be ready on such a 
day. The butler went to a great wine merchant 
to try if he could not find some ; there was none to 
be had in the three kingdoms, but the merchant 
said : " If you have left a single bottle in the 
cellar, I can make you as much as you want, and 
defy the king to tell the difference, if it is used 
within a week ; but after a week it will be no better 
than dishwater." The story illustrates the differ- 
ence between pure genius and mere talent. 

A man of talent will write a book that will sell 
like the " Ledger." Genius will write a book that 
will have to darkle and ripen down in the publish- 
er's cellars, but the wine of genius percolates 
through twenty centuries into the comet year, and 
once ripened and gathered, the time that turns 
the work of mere talent into dishwater puts spirit 
and life into the work of genius. I can remember 
when Tennyson was excluded from the subscrip- 
tion library in Leeds, because, as they said, " He 
was only a newspaper poet." And I suppose 
Shakespeare did not understand himself so well as 
many bright souls now understand him, because 
his genius has ripened and grown strong and fine 
through time. 

Now, this is some hint of genius, and Haw- 
thorne was a man of genius, so he had to submit 
to this common experience of his order. He 



268 CLEAR GRIT 

claimed, for a long time, to be the most thoroughly 
unknown author in America. 

If the noble gentleman whose name used to stand 
at the head of the firm that published " Haw- 
thorne's Note Books," and whose service to Amer- 
ican Literature was beyond all praise, would have 
printed a book like " Lackington's Confessions," 
it will contain a story Mr. Fields told me once of 
the way he found the " Scarlet Letter " and the 
author of it. It was among the most touching 
and pathetic things I ever listened to. 

Hawthorne, then, was clean broken down; the 
public neglect had chilled him to the heart and 
made him feel that his idea of writing to any pur- 
pose was a mere chimera. And it is sad, also, to 
remember now that all through these times this 
man of genius had to float out and in on the rising 
and falling tide of a political party. 

It is none the less pitiful that a man like Haw- 
thorne, proud, shy, and sensitive as any soul God 
ever made, should have to be a camp-follower and 
tide-waiter on the fortunes of a political cam- 
paign. 

And when Franklin Pierce stands before the 
great white throne of the generations to come, it 
will hide a multitude of sins to remember that he 
loved his old schoolmate so well as to give him 
the best he had, and so, in money at least, and 
what money will buy, to save this nation some such 
regret as the Scotch will always feel for their neg- 
lect of Burns. 



HAWTHORNE 269 

Then, noticing Hawthorne's genius briefly on 
the side of its limitations, I would venture to say 
that he is the Hamlet of the American mind. He 
sees deeply, but, on the whole, too sadly. No 
man among our writers equals him in the power 
to touch the innermost springs of the soul; and 
yet I think the whole result of what he does differs 
somehow from the whole truth and life, because 
3'^ou can never rise from reading what he has writ- 
ten feeling quite so cheerful and confident in God 
and man, and life here and everywhere, as when 
you sat down. 

Hawthorne never really laughs with you, or 
with life, or at you, or at life ; he will often tell you 
laughable things, yet there is little that is bright 
and breezy, even in them. He speaks somewhere 
of his work as the " moonlight of romance." His 
light is the moonlight of life, and if there was no 
greater light to rule the day than Hawthorne's 
there would be neither corn nor roses. There is 
no great reach of bright, rippling sunHght in his 
books ; a grain of nightshade pervades them all, 
as a grain of musk will pervade a chamber. 

Then I wonder, sometimes, if it is not because 
Hawthorne's ancestors were such mighty, witch- 
burning Puritans, that the sin was visited on the 
fourth generation in that fatal faculty for seeing 
the grim side of Puritanism and remaining sand- 
blind to so much in it that was beautiful and good. 

It is possible that the fine nature of the Haw- 
thornes, culminating in this man, made it impera- 



no CLEAR GRIT 

tive that a blind devotion to Puritanism in the 
seventeenth century should grow into a blind prej- 
udice against it in the nineteenth; not seen so 
clearly, however, in his antagonism to the churches 
and the religion, so-called, as in his antago- 
nism to the great anti-slavery movement, the ripest 
and best fruit of the old tree. 

Then I would mention Hawthorne's preference 
for what is fearful and criminal over what is 
healthy and inspiring, and the sense you have that 
the author is telling you what he has dreamed, 
rather than what he has seen and handled, while 
his dream still assumes a sharp and solid reality. 
So I don't expect, when I go to Salem, to meet 
the man whose wife lost five dollars by keeping a 
cent shop, but if Emerson had told me about him 
I should look out for him at every turning. 

These, I think, are Hawthorne's limitations, or 
some of them. But it is the simple truth to say 
that, in despite of his limitations, we can find in 
this man's books what cannot be found, beside, in 
the native literature of this new world. For, first 
of all, each one of Hawthorne's great works is 
devoted to the gradual development of a great 
idea. 

The '* Scarlet Letter " is a revelation of the 
truth of Paul's words, that " some men's sins are 
open beforehand, going before them to judgment, 
and some men's sins follow after them." In open- 
ing this truth, through the sin on which the story 
turns, it is wonderful to notice how the man man- 



HAWTHORNE 271 

ages to keep on the exact line between a Puritan 
reserv^e and .a wild ima^nation. Hester's slow 
and painful purification is crowned by no perfect 
happiness. Dimmesdale's confessions are only the 
last relief of the soul on earth from what must 
have barred its entrance into Heaven, and he has 
to bear the dreadful burden of his secret sin into 
the holiest places a man can enter until the whole 
weight and corrosion of it kills him, while the tall 
woman in gray, whose dust is laid in the old King's 
Chapel graveyard at last, is not buried so near 
another grave that their dust can ever mingle. 

" The House of the Seven Gables," again, is de- 
voted to the development of the idea that evil 
deeds can be transmitted, with an ever-gathering 
force, from age to age, blighting some life in every 
generation. Hawthorne makes the shadow of the 
first bad Pincheon hang like a black cloud about 
the house he built. It spoils the water in the well, 
eats into the heart of the roses on the wall, and 
every detail, to the minutest, points back to that 
old time. The first Pincheon dead in his fine new 
house, with a gout of blood on his lips, and the 
last Pincheon dead in the same chair, and in the 
same way, with the chips and shavings of the new 
building turned to fat soil by the long accumula- 
tion of dead leaves and blossoms, this is a picture 
not to be surpassed for somber grandeur any- 
where. It reminds you of that ancient conception 
of eternity, a ring made of a serpent. 

In the " Marble Faun," again, Hawthorne tries 



CLEAR GRIT 



to show how, through a sin, sudden and impulsive 
Hke that of the prodigal, and after that, true pen- 
itence for his sin, a man may reach a higher hu- 
manit}^ than would probably have come to him if 
he had never transgressed. But one feels as if the 
finest thing in the " Marble Faun " must be its 
power to carry you, as on invisible wings, to Rome. 
I doubt whether any book in existence, beside, can 
give, in a few words, such a sense of the very 
Rome of Rome ; it is not only that the things are 
photographs, but the impression, as you read the 
book, is precisely that which is made on you by 
the grandeur, the mournfulness, the sublimity and 
the pettiness of the old city, in which you get a 
new reading of the proverb, " And, lying down 
with the children of the Caesars, you rise up with 
fleas." 

But beside this great purpose, which I can- 
not follow further, running through Hawthorne's 
books, who can tell what wonder there is in 
them, and nature, and humor, and pathos, and 
how the witchery of his genius touches everything. 
Everybody falls in love with Phoebe Pincheon at 
first sight, and, like all true lovers, can see no fault 
in anything she does. How I admire the way she 
pits herself against that ancient woman in a white 
short gown and green petticoat, who comes to bar- 
ter her yarn for store goods. How I smack my 
lips at the beer she brews, nectarous to the pal- 
ate and of a rare virtue to the stomach, and at 
the cakes she bakes, which whoever tastes, long- 



HAWTHORNE 273 

ingly desires to taste again. I know she will suc- 
ceed in that shop, which in one day has driven 
poor old Hepsibah distracted, beside resulting in 
selling the best part of her stock for a few coppers 
and a bad ninepence — the girl doing it all, too, 
as he says, with such a native gush and flow of 
spirit that she is never perfectly quiet, any more 
than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble; 
possessing, also, the gift of song so naturall}^ that 
you never think of asking her where she caught 
it, any more than you would think of asking a 
bird. I take back every word I said about Haw- 
thorne's genius being moonlight, in the presence of 
Phcebe Pincheon. Phoebe is sunlight, with a smell 
of sweet brier and Southern wood and sweet fern 
and roses and fresh fallen rains and free blowing 
winds and all beside that is bright and good in a 
bright and good woman. The mention of Old 
Maid Pincheon's shop, again, brings up Haw- 
thorne's queer, racy, pungent, pathetic humor; a 
humor that lurks in almost everything he says, 
but overflows, at times, in the " Blithedale Ro- 
mance," and the " House of the Seven Gables." 
It is a humor that reminds you of Charles Lamb, 
and yet you feel that they are as distinct as the 
tones of unrelated bells. 

" They told slanderous tales about our inabil- 
ity to yoke our own oxen, or to drive them afield, 
or to release the poor brutes from their bond at 
nightfall," he says in the " BHthedale Romance," 
and " they had the face to say that the cows 



£74 CLEAR GRIT 

laughed at us for our milking, and always kicked 
the pails over because we set the stools on the 
wrong side. They said we hoed up whole acres of 
Indian corn and drew the earth carefully about 
the weeds ; that we raised five hundred tufts of 
burdocks for cabbage, and spent the better part 
of the month of June in reversing a field of beans 
that had come up, as we supposed, wrong way 
first." 

But I think this humor plays most beautifully, 
yet with a wonderful wealth of pathos interthread- 
ing it, in his description of poor Hepsibah Pin- 
cheon, keeping store. 

As she dresses her window to be ready for cus- 
tomers, puts up an elephant of gingerbread that 
tumbles down into ruin, upsets a tumbler of mar- 
bles that roll everywhere except to the place they 
started from, the sturdy fellow who makes the 
first purchase and gets it for nothing, eats the 
Jim Crow and comes back for a camel, and still 
holds on to his penny, to see whether that can- 
not be had as cheap as the other, is simply perfect. 
This store, and the Pincheon chickens, and old 
Uncle Vennor, are all full of the fine subtle humor 
at which you are ready to laugh and weep at the 
same moment. 

When a man went to Wollaston, the great chem- 
ist, and wanted to see the things by which he had 
wrought such marvelous results to chemistry, he 
was shown some watch-glasses, testing-papers, a 
balance, and a blowpipe. 



HAWTHORNE 2*75 

It is the truth about Hawthorne, too. No man 
ever wrought out such great things with such 
scanty materials outside himself. 

And then, in the " Note Books " we have the 
key to his secret ; they are Hawthorne's Hand 
Book of Genius. No such revelation has ever been 
made before, that I remember, of the hidden work- 
ings of this gift. How he came to be what he is, 
so far as he can tell, he tells us in those volumes ; 
watch his great conceptions here in their first 
germs ; trace some of them through their gradual 
growth; see how many more never came into life; 
and what a wealth of life, and thought, and ob- 
servation, altogether, was hidden away in this sen- 
sitive, shrouded soul. 

Not long ago the papers told us how nearly 
somebody had made a diamond ; it was a great suc- 
cess right up to the point where the diamond be- 
gins. Hawthorne carries us past that point and 
shows us how the diamond is made, and then gives 
it into our hand. No student of the deeper work- 
ings of the human soul, and the way it takes to do 
great and wonderful things, can feel that he has 
completed his study, if he has not mastered Haw- 
thorne's " Note Books " ; this is their great qual- 
ity, but beside this they contain matter in plenty 
of a common, everyday interest. Quick glimpses 
of, and glances at, life, crowd them thick. He 
opens doors a moment and lets you look into stores, 
and taverns, and houses, and watch the life there, 
and then he shuts the doors again and the life 



^76 CLEAR GRIT 

is no more seen, but what you do see is as if you 
were there yourself. 

Hawthorne's eyes are yours ; that much of the 
" Note Book " is as good as your own experience, 
and altogether they are among the best treasures, 
if not the very best, given to the world in our 
time. 

And so in this age of reading, and of books so 
cheap that no young man or woman need be at a 
loss for all the reading he or she has time for, the 
question is well worth asking, " What shall I read 
which will be of the truest interest, and, at the 
same time, of a real worth ? " It is a wide ques- 
tion, and one which can by no means be answered 
at the close of a discourse, but this brief word may 
be said in all confidence, and it touches Hawthorne 
as it touches not many men and women who have 
written stories in our day : If we love to read fic- 
tion, and I think a moderate amount of this read- 
ing is a very good thing, it is always best to read 
the best, while those stories are best worth read- 
ing, as a rule, we can trust, which have on them 
and in them the spell of a true genius, and of 
these I would rank Hawthorne's books among the 
first ; his best works are works of undoubted gen- 
ius. His brain was as great as Webster's ; his 
eye for Nature and our human life more true ; and 
his power to interest his readers, when once he has 
caught us in his subtle spell, supreme. 



WHITTIER 

When I think of John Greenleaf Whittier, his 
lovely given name tempts me to ask If the gift of 
prophecy can be quite lost out of this world, and 
if bees do not still murmur about some cradles and 
angels attend to the naming of some children, as 
we read they did for the child John in the old 
time; else how could a name of such a fine fitness 
have been given to the child in rural New Hamp- 
shire, ninety-two years ago, as this which blends 
the great forerunner and the beloved disciple with 
the fragrance and beauty of the woods in June; 
while there Is still another fine suggestion in the 
family name, for it means in the old English (my 
dictionary of English surnames says), those who 
made white the kid skins for the glover's use — 
and no damage is done to this suggestion by say- 
ing the name John Greenleaf may have been given 
to some grandsire, because in that case the grand- 
sire must have been close of kin to our poet. So 
the first man of the line who won the name must 
have won it by some quality that in the last man 
will preserve the lovely distinction for centuries 
to come. 

Indeed, one has to look for some such ancestry 
lying far back, it may be, in life and time, because 
the babe was bom into a home and society possess- 
277 



278 CLEAR GRIT 

ing many noble qualities, as we all know, but this 
was hardly one of them ninety years ago which 
could give birth to such a name. There is a 
touch of poesy in it, the glory and the freshness 
of a dream, and there are things in the journals 
of George Fox that touch you in this fashion. 
But the usage of Friends became a sort of Othel- 
lo's pillow to poetry and music and the soaring 
of a fine imagination, so that the given name may 
have come down from the times of Chaucer or be- 
fore, for the true answer in his case to the question 
what's in a name — in this name. 

And I still remember talking with him once 
about his childhood and youth, in which he told me 
about the poetry which was current then among 
Friends, and recited some verses with a fine touch 
of humor, not in the verses but in the man, for 
there were moments when this gift so sweet and 
rare would bubble up from his heart like water 
from the spring, while this was what I garnered 
from those rare moments with him, that the boy 
must find and force his way out of an atmosphere 
which was almost perfect as a non-conductor in 
this respect, and to fight for his right to sing be- 
fore he could be heard as a singer. 

We all remember, again, his exquisite picture 
of the home in " Snow-Bound," in which the boy 
nestled dreaming his dreams, noble and sweet as 
the " Cotter's Saturday Night " to me ; but he 
also printed a small book many years ago, in 
which we catch some glances of the home which 



WHITTIER ^79 

are of all the more worth because of the delicate 
veil that falls down and leaves you to guess his 
secret. He sketches for us a small farmhouse in 
a lovely vallej^ half surrounded with woods and 
with no neighbors to be seen from the doors, or 
rarely the smoke of another chimney. There are 
wild hills rising away to the southward, green 
meadows to the east, and a small stream brawls 
noisily down a ravine, lapping the roots of the 
beech and hemlock that stand over against the 
garden. I went there with some of my children 
and grandchildren, not very long ago, and saw 
how it was done with a poet's touch, so that in 
the enchantment of the distance you may still 
catch the scent of the haymow in the old barn, 
the breath of the kine, the ferny fragrance of the 
brookside and the smell of the earth freshly turned 
to the sun in May. It is a home where a forlorn 
little newspaper comes once a week to gloss for the 
bo}^ the world which for him lies far away, and 
where he remembers the beggars would come now 
and then, even in those times, and be much com- 
forted at the sight of the plain cap about the 
housemother's face, for Friends did not give cold 
scraps, and beggars were quite particular. 

The boy remembers how such an one came, one 
wild evening, and was turned away by the mother 
because he looked like a bandit, but when he had 
gone, a shadow fell over the steadfast inner light 
in the mother's heart, for she said, " He must have 
had a mother — God help him — and I have sons 



S80 CLEAR GRIT 

and daughters. Now suppose this should be their 
doom some night and they find another woman as 
hard-hearted as I am to this poor stranger." So 
she sent out after him and bid him come back. He 
came and proved to be an Italian, but no bandit, 
and after a good supper, he told them about the 
grape gatherings in his dear far-away Tuscany, 
and the festivals so far-away from Friends' usage, 
with many more wonders well worth the supper, 
and would fain have taught the mother how to 
make beautiful bread out of the chestnuts, but she 
said : " I thank thee. We do very well with our 
wheat and rye and our com," and so when he 
went away, another vista was opened to the boy's 
budding imagination, stretching away as I saw 
the selfsame land last summer, into a land of 
mountain and valley, of vine-clad slopes and 
meadows, with the Arno in their heart, and the 
May sun flooding all like the Paradise of God. 

This was the home of the boy whose farthest 
journey abroad was to the mill and to Friends' 
meeting — Reade's " Charles Lamb " says : " Dost 
thou love a silence as deep as that before the winds 
were made? So in a Quaker meeting, I have 
seen faces there on which the dove of peace sat 
visibly brooding. The meeting may be all si- 
lent, but the mind has been fed ; you go away with 
a sermon not made with hands, you have bathed 
in stillness. When the spirit is sore fretted, tired 
even to sickness of the j anglings and nonsense 
noises of the world, what a solace it is to go and 



WHITTIER 281 

seat yourself for a quiet half hour among the gen- 
tle Quakers." 

It was in this pure silence the boy sat on 
First Da}^, but because he was a boy, I think he 
would not take it as the elders did, and when a 
voice brake the stillness, usually the voice of an 
aged woman who had a few words to say which 
might suit the condition of some present, I have 
reason to believe they did not suit him at all. So 
he would be watching the faces of the elders and 
longing for that slight tremor when to the minute, 
though they consulted no timepiece, they would 
reach out their hands to each other as if an elec- 
tric thrill had passed through the meeting, and 
all Avas over. The boy was out again into the 
sunshine where the birds were, singing as if singing 
also was worship, and the waters went leaping 
down, as he says, and kicking up their pagan heels 
on Sundays, as if it were in sheer contempt of 
those who would have the world stand still one day 
in seven. 

It was in these boyhood days a great wonder 
befell, of which he told me the first time we met. 
Members of the Society of Friends who were 
accepted ministers were in the habit of visiting the 
distant meetings then, as they do now, and were 
the guests of the Friends who were of the best re- 
pute and standing. I was often their guest in the 
old Abolition days, forty or more years ago, when 
I would go out lecturing on the burning question, 
and never found a warmer welcome than that they 



282 CLEAR GRIT 

would give me, especially at the stations of the 
underground railroad, where the poor fugitives 
would hide on their way to Canada and freedom. 

Well, an old minister came one day to the Whit- 
tier home, and Mr. Whittier told me how, after 
supper, he drew two small volumes out of his sad- 
dle bags, and said to him : " John, has thee read 
the poems of Robert Burns? " He had not read 
or even heard of them. So the old man put them 
into his hands. He told me how he began to read 
them, devouring them indeed, until it was time to 
go to his bed, and stole down in the gray light 
next morning to read again. The old man came 
down early and found him reading away, liter- 
ally, for dear life. I think he must have moved 
away from the testimonies of Friends, for he said, 
" John, thee seems to like those poems. I am go- 
ing to the meetings farther on. I will leave the 
books with thee until I return." And so the great 
poets of humanity and of freedom met there in the 
home and clasped hands and hearts, the boy with 
the towering brow and dark, gleaming eyes, inno- 
cent as the angels of the presence, and the singer 
slain in his prime, whose dust lay under the this- 
tles in the old churchyard in Dumfries. 

" That," he said, " marks an era in my life. 
Reading the poems of Burns, I entered then into 
a new world, the poet's world, full of truth and 
grace. I found no taint of evil in the poems," he 
concluded, " and I find none now. They are sweet 



WHITTIER 283 

to me still, and lovely as the banks and braes of 
Bonnie Doon." 

He told me also of another poet, a native of New 
Hampshire and of the same Scotch-Irish stock as 
himself, Robert Dinsmore. He saw him once in 
the market-place at Haverhill, an old man then of 
seventy, with a face all seamed and bronzed, his 
whitQ hair pouring down in patriarchal glory 
from under his old felt hat. He was standing 
there sturdily in his cowhide boots, the picture of 
the fine old yeoman of New Hampshire. It was in 
the poet's corner of their local paper he had sung, 
and in the Scotch-Irish dialect. His song to a 
sparrow, which you will find in the Library of 
American Literature, edited by Stedman, still 
holds a tender melody of its own — while you are 
aware of its close kinship to the master's lovely 
poem to a mouse. Still he was a true singer in the 
early morning of our day, and his poems, as they 
were read by the boy, held the fine quality of the 
native soil, for he told of the rustic life of which 
he was, with a homely beauty and melody which 
went right to the boy's heart. So Robert Dins- 
more has a place in the making of our man. 

Then, to find our man, we must touch the secrets 
of what Ave have come to call heredity and environ- 
ment, which lie far back and within for us all, and 
note how it was that this quiet Quaker boy was a 
born fighter in the very marrow of his bones. And 
he used to say that in spite of the peaceful an- 



284 CLEAR GRIT 

cestry that lay nearest to his Hfe in the home and 
Friends' meeting, there must be some old Ber- 
serker warrior lurking in his line or in his boy- 
hood, or he never could have listened with such a 
passionate delight to the stories of the old war- 
riors of the Revolution, who would fight their bat- 
tles over again in his hearing, or taken such a 
fancy to Jonathan, the son of Saul, when he went 
out to fight the garrison at Michmash, or felt as 
he did that the fight between Christian and Apol- 
lyon was the very best bit in the " Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress." So the fighting blood must have come to 
him honestly, he would say, from the old sea 
kings. 

And this may be true, but the truth which lies 
nearer to his cradle is this, that the whole region 
in which he was raised up there among the hills was 
salted with the fire of fighting. These Derry folks, 
as they were called, were of the blood we still call 
Scotch-Irish, and I may say in passing that Horace 
Greeley was also of this strain, and tells us in his 
chapters of autobiography that in Derry, in the 
early times when the Indians were hovering about 
the settlement to bum and murder old Parson 
MacGregor, who had been a soldier in Cromwell's 
Ironsides, he would go into the pulpit on a Sun- 
day with his musket on his arm, see carefully to 
the priming, set it gently down, turn to the con- 
gregation, clasp his hands, but keep his eyes wide 
open, and say, " Let us pray," for watch and pray 
then and there caught a new meaning. Matthew 



WHITTIER 285 

Clarke was another minister of this old fighting 
stock who had fought in the siege of Derry against 
the Irish horde, the grandest story Macaulay has 
to tell of valor and the manhood which could not 
be beaten. He was acting as moderator one day 
in the Presbytery, when he heard the drum-beat 
of a marching company, and began to keep step, 
so that the brethren had to call him to order, but 
it was all no use. " I can do nae business," he 
cried, " when I hear the roll of the drums ; " and 
commenting one Sunday on Peter's cutting off the 
high priest's servant's ear, — " A pretty man, in- 
deed," he cried, "just to cut off his ear; I would 
have split his heid right doon." And when he 
must die, he gave directions that his old com- 
rades in arms should bear him to the grave, wear- 
ing the breastplates and the dinted steel caps, and 
fire the muskets over the dust that had held back 
the hordes when they stood shoulder to shoulder 
in the grand old debate behind the breastworks 
of Derry over the sea. 

Let me linger a moment longer over this colony 
within the colony among the granite hills. We 
have seen no fighters like them in these modern 
times, except Stonewall Jackson and his like. 
They united a faith as stern and austere as that 
of John Knox with a genuine half -Irish love of 
fun and frolic you could find nowhere else in New 
England. They made long prayers, and some- 
times by no means short revels, were as fiery in 
their tippling as their tenets, and were ready to 



286 CLEAR GRIT 

wrestle with the stoutest unbelievers over the fiv9 
points of Calvin: 

" To catechise him ilka quirk, 
An' share him weel wi' hell," 

but when they were through, would treat him like 
a prince. It was said of them, indeed, by their 
Puritan neighbors to the south, that they would 
give up a pint of doctrine for a pint of rum, and 
when in one of the churches, the deacons intimated 
to the minister that it would be a good thing if 
he would insist more strongly in his sermons on 
the people renouncing their " ain righteousness," 
he answered, " Weel, weel, but ye must just proove 
to me that they have any to renounce." 

But within this manhood, we find another and 
more noble budding forth from the strong roots 
and bole. Ten minutes after the news of Lex- 
ington reached Derry, John Stark stopped his 
sawmill, mounted his horse and rode away to join 
the forces in revolt, leaving word for his neighbors 
to come along. He was in time for the Battle of 
Bunker Hill, and as his men went into the fight, 
he said, " Boys, aim at their waistbands." He 
was chosen to retake Ticonderoga, and as he went 
into the fight, shouted, " There they are, boys. 
We will beat them to-day or Molly Stark will be 
a widow." There were five hundred men in this 
district of Derry, and of these, three hundred and 
forty-seven went into the Army of the Revolution, 



WHITTIER 287 

and only two of this number were unable to write 
their own names. 

This was the manhood from which our poet 
sprang, and it is to his kinship with them that we 
may turn when we want to know how it was that 
he should be a born fighter for freedom, not alone 
for the State but for the Republic, in strains that 
smote the heart of the North like the sound of 
trumpets. His kinship with the life in the old 
land again, whence the colonists came here, held 
him close to a certain sympathy with Ireland and 
her race. " I confess," he says, " to this sympa- 
thy for the Irishman, a stranger in a strange land. 
The poorest and rudest holds a romance in his 
life and history, for amid all his gayety of heart, 
his wit and drollery, the poor fellow has sad 
thoughts of the old mother of him sitting in her 
cabin alone, or a father's blessing or a sister's 
farewell is haunting him, or a mound in the grave- 
yard beyant the wild wathers. And when these 
thoughts crowd into his heart, the new world is 
forgotten and blue Kilkenny stretches far away, 
and the LufFy sparkles where we only see the Hud- 
son or the Merrimac." 

There was a vein of humor also in Whittier 
you would not suspect in reading his poems, which 
must have come to him by inheritance, for it 
could hardly be through his nurture in the Quaker 
home and meeting when the century was in its 
teens. He could tell a capital story, and one of 
these you will find printed in his prose about a 



288 CLEAR GRIT 

Mormon meeting he attended once, in which the 
elder told of a visit to Europe. " I had only three 
cents in my pocket," he said, " when I landed, so 
I went to the professors of religion, told them who 
I was, and that I was a Mormon ; but they told me, 
when I asked them to help me, that I was damned 
already, and had better go where I belonged. So 
when I was clean beat out, I knelt down and 
prayed, ' Lord, give me this day my daily bread,' 
and I tell you I prayed with an appetite. Then 
I sat up and knocked at the first door I came to 
and told the man I was a minister and was starv- 
ing. Would he give me a piece of bread .^^ I did 
not tell him I was a Mormon, and he said, * Bless 
you, yes, come in and eat all you want,' which I 
did, and he seemed to enjoy my meal about as well 
as I did, and then he told me he was not one of my 
sort at all, but the folks about there called him an 
infidel." 

He tells another capital story of a beggar who 
came to him one day with a look of misery that 
was very touching, and handed him a paper setting 
forth that the bearer was a poor shipwrecked 
Italian who could speak no English. " But," he 
says, " as I was thinking how much I should give 
him and trying to recall all the reasons I had 
ever heard why I should not give him a cent, it 
flashed on me that I had relieved him three times 
before, once as a Penobscot Indian who had lost 
the use of his hands in trapping, once as the fa- 
ther of six small children who was poisoned and 



WHITTIER ^9 

crippled by the mercury doctors, and once as a 
poor man from down East, who had gone West and 
got what he called ' fever nager.' So I said to 
him, * Why, Stephen, how does thee do? ' and he 
answered, ' How do ye do? I thought I knew yer, 
and how's the folks? You see this ain't reely my 
paper. I took it to help a poor furriner what 
can't help himself nor make himself understood 
no more nor a wild goose, so I thought I would jest 
start him forrard a little. It seemed a mercy to 
do it, ye see, but I guess I done enough.' " 

And so, born into this quiet home, nurtured in 
the white robes of a perfect peace, and trained to 
think of war as the most fearful evil that can be- 
fall us, as well as a deep-dyed sin, our man was 
within all this a fighter — as my dear old friend 
Lucretia Mott always declared she was — and he 
was in training for a captaincy, not to fight with 
carnal weapons, but with the sword of the spirit 
which is the word of God, and inherited enough of 
the old Adam from the old fighting Scotch-Irish 
to send a cry through the land that stirred the 
heart of the nation, I said, as the sound of trum- 
pets calling men to the battle. 

But turning now toward what is most precious 
in Whittier, we have to note that he was first of 
all, and best of all, a poet, and as a poet he will 
live, while all beside is only tributary and to be 
studied only as it helps to mold the man who has 
sung the songs of which the noblest and the best 
touch our common life. 



590 CLEAR GRIT 

It was no small matter — it is a matter, in- 
deed, of the greatest moment, — that he should be 
born and brought up in such a home and that he 
should be of that fine Quaker stock and quality, be- 
cause it has been well said that Quakerism stands 
for a sort of divine democracy, that George Fox 
gave the word an infinite divine meaning, and 
taught long before the great German that he who 
touches the human body touches Heaven. 

It was through Quakerism Whittier found the 
deep and holy meaning which lies in the word 
" man," and to be a whole man is the sum of all 
we know of under God. I said that the sect was, 
in his early life, a non-conductor to the poetry 
and music which were in the boy's heart, but I love 
to believe it was also under God the stored force 
and life out of which the power came to sing, and 
gave meaning and purpose to the songs which 
might else have been a babblement of musical 
numbers with the fire of the immanent heavens 
left out. And to my mind, as Shakespeare stands 
for life and Wordsworth for nature, so Whittier 
in his measure — and it is a noble measure — 
stands and sings for man manly and manful. So 
we must never forget this in our study of his po- 
ems. It is the master chord in his singing. It 
was of man and for man he first began to sing; 
and trying after strains he still clings to the one 
grand keynote, — the Son of Man, — so what has 
been said of another we may truly say of him : — 



WHITTIER 291 

" In the long and lone night watches, 

Sky above and earth below, 
Thou didst learn a higher wisdom 

Than the babbling schoolmen know; 
For the stars and the silence taught thee. 

As God's angels only can, 
That the one sole sacred thing below 

The cope of heaven is man.*' 

It was for this reason again that Whittier must 
be the sacred singer of the Abolitionists. The 
Abolitionist went back to the man ; he affirmed the 
manhood of the negro and his rights as these are 
set forth in the prelude to our Declaration of In- 
dependence. Whittier set the demand to music 
and poured into it the inspiration and the fire 
from heaven of his genius and grace. The Abo- 
litionists then were outcast, they were branded as 
the off'scouring of the nation, there were none so 
poor as to do them reverence who would be counted 
loyal to the republic ; rather, eggs came flying in 
the face of the speaker. 

Whittier stood to his guns as the manhood 
whence he came to us stood at the siege of Derry. 
He revealed the old fighting blood, and yet here 
again we touch the fine heart of the Quaker home 
and meeting. " Are you drawn to him, sir.'' " I 
said once to Emerson, as we talked about another 
man, a leader in the great contest. " I can never 
feel quite easy with him," was the quiet answer, 
" there is a spark of bale fire in his eye." There 



S92 CLEAR GRIT 

was no such spark in those wonderful luminous 
eyes of our good poet. A fine thinker said of him : 
" You find no evil spirit even in his wrath. The 
man is angry and sins not, the sun does not go 
down on his wrath, the fires in his nature burn 
only for justice and mercy, and those who are 
most scathed by them owe him no hatred in return. 
It is that most dreadful thing, the wrath of the 
Lamb, because gentleness has been exhausted." 

But again we should have been obliged to think 
of him as of one who was not quite true to his 
blending of the soldier and the Quaker, if he had 
sung no songs but these for the freedom of the 
slave, for that would have resulted in a certain 
narrowness, as fatal to his beautiful genius as in 
Ebenezer Elliott, if he had only given us the corn- 
law rhymes. The deep religious and human in- 
stincts which compelled him to plead with the na- 
tion and for the nation held him always true to 
the inward light, and some of the finest fruits of 
his genius dip most purely into his own SouPs 
vision of earth and heaven. I mind how I said to 
him, when one of these poems was printed in the 
Atlantic Monthly, " Who was Andrew Rykman, 
sir? I have never met with his name in my read- 
ing, yet he must have been a man of mark." He 
said no word, but that wonderful smile, as when 
the sunshine sweeps across a field of ripening 
grain, swept over the face, and he turned his hand 
with a delicate movement toward himself — he was 
Andrew Rykman. I ventured to say to him once, 



WHITTIER S93 

also, as I remember, " Do you write easily, sir? " 
" No, not now," he answered, " I can write no 
poem now which does not bring on a severe head- 
ache, which sometimes cripples me for days after 
it is done." 

This was the man I knew and loved, or rather 
some hint of the man who has surely won the 
great " Well done," and stands now in 

" the Choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence : live 
In pulses stirred to generosity. 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
Of miserable aims that end with self. 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like 
stars." 



THOREAU 

Thirty-one years ago last June * a man came 
to see me in Chicago whom I was very glad and 
proud to meet. It was Henry Thoreau of Concord, 
the Diogenes of this new world, the Hermit of Wal- 
den Woods. The gentle and loving misanthropist 
and apostle of individualism so singular and sepa- 
rate that I do not know where to look for his 
father or his son — the most perfect instance to be 
found I think of American independence run to seed, 
or shall we say to a mild variety which is very fair 
to look on but can never sow itself for another 
harvest. The man of a natural mind which was 
not enmity against God, but in a great and wide 
sense was subject to the law of God and to no 
other law. The saint of the bright ages and the 
own brother in this to the Saint of the dark ages, 
who called the wild creatures that run and fly his 
sisters and brothers, and was more intimate with 
them than he was with our human kind. The man 
of whom, so far as pure seeing goes, Jesus would 
have said " blessed are your eyes, for thei/ see/* 
and whose life I want to touch this evening for 
some lessons that as it seems to me he alone could 
teach those who would learn. 

* Delivered first at the Church of the Messiah, January 

28, 1883. 

294 



THOREAU 295 

As I remember Henry Thoreau then, he was 
something over forty years of age but would have 
easily passed for thirty-five, and he was rather 
slender, but of a fine, delicate mold, and with a pres- 
ence which touched you with the sense of perfect 
purity as newly opened roses do. It is a clear 
rose-tinted face he turns to me through the mist of 
all these years, and delicate to look on as the face 
of a girl; also he has great gray eyes, the seer's 
eyes full of quiet sunshine. But it is a strong 
face, too, and the nose is especially notable, being 
as Conway said to me once of Emerson's nose, a 
sort of interrogation mark to the universe. His 
voice was low, but still sweet in the tones and in- 
flections, though the organs were all in revolt just 
then and wasting away and he was making for the 
great tablelands beyond us Westwards, to see if he 
could not find there a new lease of life. His words 
also were as distinct and true to the ear as those 
of a great singer, and he had Tennyson's splendid 
gift in this, that he never went back on his tracks 
to pick up the fallen loops of a sentence as com- 
monplace talkers do. He would hesitate for an 
instant now and then, waiting for the right word, 
or would pause with a pathetic patience to master 
the trouble in his chest, but when he was through 
the sentence was perfect and entire, lacking noth- 
ing, and the word was so purely one with the man 
that when I read his books now and then I do not 
hear my own voice within my reading but the voice 
I heard that day. 



296 CLEAR GRIT 

This is the picture I treasure of Henry Tho- 
reau as I saw him in my own house the year before 
he died. There is a splendid engraving after 
Landseer over the sofa where he sits talking, that 
vanished in the great fire. The children are play- 
ing about the house, the house mother is busy, the 
June sunshine floods the place and it is afternoon; 
and then, as Bunyan says, he went on his way and 
I saw him no more. But I went to Concord not 
very long after to see his grave and to wander 
through Walden Woods and sit by the pond, to 
talk with Mr. Emerson about him to my heart's 
great content, and to eat ripe pears the host had 
hidden away in the nooks and corners of his study. 
He selected the best for his visitors, I remember, 
with the hospitality of an Arab, and took the second 
best for himself pear after pear without flinching, 
and how many pears we ate that day it would be 
hard to say. That was a day also to be marked 
with a white stone. Concord and the woods and 
the talk with the one man in all the world who had 
known Thoreau best gave permanence to the photo- 
graph I had taken of him in the year before and 
helped to bring out the lights and shadows. We 
are not sure it would be best to meet some men who 
have touched us by their genius, but it seems to me 
now that to see Thoreau as I did that day in 
Chicago and hear him talk was the one thing need- 
ful to me, because he was so simply and entirely the 
man I had thought of when I read what he had 
written. There was no lapse, no missing link ; the 



THOREAU 297 

books and the man were one, and I found it was 
true of him also that " the word was made flesh 
and dwelt among us." 

So I have lingered over this memory because it 
has always led me to think as much of the man as 
of the books he has written, rare and unique as 
these are to my own mind. It was said of one 
who was of a somewhat similar make, " he will be 
a wild man," and so I love to think of Thoreau as 
another Ishmael, wild but wholesome from his 
youth upward, and nourishing in his nature the 
very dissidence of dissent. That fitful visit to my 
home on a summer afternoon stands to me for a 
very fair type of his nature and inmost quality. 
He would stay with no man for a longer term 
than he stayed with me of his own free will, any 
more than the wild birds will stay away from their 
own hiding places. They imprisoned him once 
about some small matter of a poll tax, but then he 
said, " I saw if there was a stone wall between me 
and my townsmen there was a greater wall and 
stronger to break through before they could be 
as free as I was even in their house of durance," 
and so it was not of the bondage but the freedom 
he thought. When Emerson, as I take it, went 
to see him, as he sat in durance, his saying to him, 
" Why are you here? " was only met by the answer, 
" Why are you not here ? " He would not even 
say, " I would that thou wert altogether such as I 
am except for these bands," because sitting there 
he could say with the fine old poet: 



CLEAR GRIT 

" Stone walls do not a prison make 
Or iron bars a cage." 



" I see young men, my townsmen," he said once, 
" whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, 
but it had been better for them to have been born 
in the open pasture and nursed there, that they 
might see with clearer eyes the larger field they 
might dwell in. Who made them the serfs of the 
soil ? Why should they begin digging their graves 
as soon as they are born? How many an im- 
mortal soul have I met wellnigh crushed under 
its load of earth! The better part of the man is 
ploughed into the soil for compost. It is a fool's 
life such men live, as they will find when they get 
to the end of it, if not before." 

And I have thought it would be both pleasant 
and wholesome to teach this bit of native genius, 
especially this declaration of independence com- 
pacted together and bound up in one man, not for 
its own sake alone but for our sakes also who are 
the servants if not the slaves of the habits and 
usages we find all about us, and are often in no 
sense free men even in those minor things which 
serve no man's manhood. 

It is often said by those who come here to look 
at us from other lands of kin to our own that, in 
despite of the freedom we have bought with a great 
price, we are not so free in many ways as they are 
in the old lands, and that within the grand lines we 
have laid down and maintain in the nation's life we 



THOREAU 299 

are only free on paper. I think there is more 
truth in this than we like to allow. We find non- 
conformity and dissent a difficult thing to com- 
pass. We fear social ostracism; we have invented 
a word of a terrible, cruel power to brand those 
withal who take their own way in dress, speech, 
manners or opinions ; we call them cranks and fear 
the word in our secret heart like the burning of 
fire. Well, the word had not taken this evil mean- 
ing in Thoreau's time, but if he were living now 
and we were only able to see the mere surface of his 
manhood as they saw it in Concord forty years 
ago, we should call him " a crank." Yet we see 
now that this was a manhood brimming over with 
one grand purpose, — to be a whole man as he 
understood manhood, — that and no more. In a 
little Quaker meeting house I saw once they told 
me an old friend used to gather every First Day 
and he was the whole meeting, sat in the silence 
with his hands clasped and his head bowed, 
and when the meeting was out shook hands in the 
spirit with himself and went home, and Thoreau 
was just such a man. The meeting to which he 
went all his life never numbered more than the 
one member. If another had come in he would 
have felt crowded and gone out to find more room. 
It is said that when Alexander went to see Di- 
ogenes, you know, and said, " Is there any favor 
I can grant you.?' " the answer was, " Yes, do not 
stand between me and the sun." It was the only 
favor Thoreau ever thought of asking for which 



300 CLEAR GRIT 

he was not ready to render a full equivalent He 
said to the whole world about him, " do not stand 
between me and the sun. Let me live my own life. 
Let me think my own thoughts. Let me say the 
word that is in my own heart. Let me be Henry 
Thoreau." 

" Nothing is so much to be feared as fear," he 
said, " and I am not sure but that Atheism may be 
popular by comparison with God himself." Such 
a saying must have been wrung out of him, as he 
observed how cheap and worthless our conformity 
may be, while to say frankly you do not believe in 
God when that is your great and rare trouble with 
yourself makes you a byword, a hissing and an 
outcast, even among those who may share your 
trouble but do not possess one grain of your sin- 
cerity. 

It is the more wonderful again that he should 
grow to be such a man when we take note of his 
training. He came up in the parish of Dr. Ripley, 
who was priest and king in Concord through Tho- 
reau's childhood and youth, and would tolerate no 
freedom of thought or action outside his own 
proper supremacy. A man whose throne was his 
character and who rested and ruled on it arbitrary 
and imperious, as one says who knew him well, " a 
whole grand man." He was sixty-three years 
minister of that church and had such staying power 
that, whereas when he came to be their minister 
a young farmer voted against his settlement on 
the ground that he was such a weakling, he would 



THOREAU 301 

either die or need a colleague in a couple of years, 
when he had been fifty years minister and told the 
church he wanted a colleague now, as he was get- 
ting old, the self-same farmer voted against that 
on the ground that the Doctor was still as young 
and strong as ever to all seeming and could do his 
work better than any other man for many a year 
to come. A man, who, as old people in Concord 
used to believe most devoutly, could storm heaven 
and make the high powers attend to him when the 
old lion was roused. For did not everybody remem- 
ber that Sunday when he rose in his place, clasped 
his hands and cried, " O God, open thy heavens 
and send down the rain. The land is parched with 
this long drought ; send down the rain. The corn 
is withering in the leaf; send down the rain. The 
cattle on the hills and in the meadows are perish- 
ing; send down the rain. The springs are drying 
up in the wells ; send down the rain and thine shall 
be the glory for ever and ever. Amen." So ran 
the prayer and when they were going home they 
saw the clouds gathering over Concord and the 
rain came pouring down in torrents, — but only on 
Concord, — so Judge Hoar told me, who was a 
lad then and remembers the wonder. And so what 
do you think of a man like that.'' He was sixty- 
three years minister of that church, and monarch, 
and the people answered to his will. 

But I love to believe that he met his match in 
this boy. I think of him in the old meeting house 
watching the old man with those fine gray eyes and 



302 CLEAR GRIT 

by no means content to let doctrine and dogma 
pass without a challenge when he once began to 
think for himself and draw his own conclusions. 
So when we hear of him for the first time to any 
clear purpose, he is not one in the two thousand 
human beings who lived in the town and were very 
much of one mind, — that being also grand old 
Dr. Ripley's mind who held the keys for Concord. 
He was a free thinker and a free agent, with no 
solder of the stereotype about him, but of a clean 
and separate type, and bound to live his own life 
in his own way, no matter what the world about 
him might say or do. He said once, '' the youth 
gets the materials together to build his temple or 
his palace on the earth, but the middle aged man 
finally concludes to build a woodshed with them." 
He does not seem to have been a man of that make, 
but kept close to his purpose of a palace or a 
temple right down to the day when he came to 
our home on his way West. 

Paul says proudly, " I was born free." Well, 
he was free also and would not be entangled again 
in the yoke of bondage. The man who knew him 
best says he never had a vice in his life. He did 
not like the taste of wine and never caught the lik- 
ing. When they said to Charles Lamb, " How did 
you learn to smoke, sir ? " he answered, " I toiled 
after it as men toil after virtue," and Thoreau 
remembered smoking lily stems when he was a boy, 
but the lily stems and the boyhood belonged to- 
gether and the smoke of this torment did not 



THOREAU 303 

ascend into his manhood. When you asked him at 
the table what dish he preferred, he would say the 
nearest, not for singularity but for simplicity. 
He did not like dinner parties, because he said 
people got into each other's way so that you could 
not meet your man there to any purpose, and then 
he said, " They take pride in making their dinner 
cost so much, while I take pride in making mine 
cost little." 

And as a New England Yankee, farm bred, he 
did one astounding thing in his youth. His father 
made black lead pencils and the youth took hold 
to learn the art. But being of the New England 
breed, which can never let well enough alone, he 
went to work presently to improve on the old man's 
methods and ended in making pencils equal to the 
best that were made in London. The artists and 
others in Boston endorsed his work gladly; no 
such pencils had been made in this country before, 
and this to the young man meant both fame and a 
fair fortune. He came home with his certificate, 
laid aside his tools, and never made another pencil. 
I think he foresaw that, if he kept on, the day might 
come when his life would pass into pencils and then 
Thoreau Maker would be all that was left of the 
man. It might have been so, or it might not, — we 
cannot tell. A man Hke Stevenson outgrows his 
locomotive. He can never be caught and impris- 
oned in that but walks free, a whole man, and 
Thoreau might have walked free of the pencils 
and the fortune, but he would not run the risk ; 



304 CLEAR GRIT 

he wanted the life, not the fortune. Other men 
could make the pencils now that he had found the 
way, and so he would make no more. 

And so one purpose in this paper is to turn the 
attention of the younger men and women who hear 
me to Thoreau's books, and especially to his 
" Walden or Life in the Woods." It is the story 
of his life as a hermit. It touches you as if Cru- 
soe had found his way into New England in our 
century and feeling overcrowded, even in 
Concord, had said, " I will live alone again as I 
did before the savage came crouching to my 
feet." 

" The world is too much with us — late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. 
Little we see in Nature that is ours. 
We give our hearts away — sordid boon." 

But Thoreau was stirred by a finer motive, and 
I think sometimes that the germ of his new ad- 
venture is to be found in the protests he had made 
long before against the great old Doctor's dogmas 
touching the smirching and befouling of this world 
of ours by the Fall of Man. It was not a fallen 
world to Thoreau, but a world forever rising. 
And so he felt, I suppose, that Eden might still be 
hidden away in Walden Woods, and that if he 
went there he might find it. Well, he did find it, 
for the wild things came about him in the old com- 
panionable way, while no more exquisite picture 
was ever made than this Thoreau makes in " Wal- 



THOREAU 305 

den " of the wonders he saw in the two years he 
was a hermit, of his good company where no man 
or woman came near him, and of his faith in the 
wild things that were all about him and their faith 
in him. He found out there, as he tells us, that 
sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sounds to 
the healthy ear, and his love indeed for the sounds 
that may touch us through the silence is like an- 
other sense. He puts hemlock boughs on his fire 
and notes how the rich salt crackling of their 
leaves is like mustard to the ear, and thinks dead 
trees love the fire. He watches the blue bird flit- 
ting through the trees and says he seems to carry 
the sky on his back. Then there comes a flash of 
scarlet and he says it is as if that bird would set 
the woods afire. He watches Walden pond and 
notices it is alive to the most delicate sheen on its 
surface. He neighbors also with the beeches and 
says no tree has so fair a bole or so handsome 
an instep as the beech. The ferns came up about 
his hermitage and he says, " Nature made ferns 
for pure leaves to show what she could do in that 
line ; " and learned to love pond lilies above all 
other blossoms. His eye came to be so true that 
when he fell once in Tuckerman's ravine and 
sprained his foot the first thing he saw as he 
gathered himself up was an herb he had never 
suspected of growing there, the best thing in the 
world for sprains. A gentleman once said to him, 
" I have been looking a long time for an In- 
dian arrowhead round here but cannot find one." 



306 CLEAR GRIT 

Thoreau stirred the sand with his foot and said, 
" here is one, take it." And another man wanted 
a certain fish but could not catch one to save him. 
Thoreau put his hand down gently as they glided 
along in the canoe and lifted one out in his palm. 
Mr Emerson says he could find his way through 
the woods on a dark night better by his feet than 
by his eyes, and could pace the ground more per- 
fectly than another man could measure it by rod 
and chain. 

Now this to my mind was by no means the 
noblest life a man can live, because it has been well 
said by a great woman that 

" On solitary souls the universe 

Looks down inhospitable. 

And the human heart 

Finds nowhere shelter but in human kind." 

But it must have been the noblest life to which 
a man so sincere and true as Thoreau was could 
attain to at that time, and this must always deter- 
mine our verdict on any man. Talking with a 
rare woman about him one day she said, " It is 
fortunate, I think, that we should only have one 
Henry Thoreau," but I ventured to answer, " Is it 
not also fortunate that we should have just this 
one ? " She could not see it ; she was the mother 
of four children asleep upstairs as we were talking, 
and she could imagine no Eden or man or manhood 
worth the name with the helpmeet left out and the 
bairns, and that may be true. 



THOREAU 307 

Still here in Walden Woods was the man in 
such an Eden as he could compass all to himself 
and ready to affirm against all comers that there 
may be a life in which it is good for the man to be 
alone. So the most of us may not be ready to 
agree with him, but we may well be content that 
he should agree with himself so entirely and with 
that unfallen world he took for two years into his 
heart and life. " I went into the woods," he says, 
" because I wanted to front only the essential 
facts of life and to see if I could learn what such a 
life had to teach me." So that which might be a 
bane to some of us was no doubt a blessing to an 
American hermit. On the far frontier a man will 
drop into the settlements now and then and offer 
his wild meats and skins for the home-made bread 
and whatever fruits of civility he may find to his 
mind, and the people are always glad to see him 
if he is a clean and wholesome man, and make ex- 
change with him and have him tell them of his life 
in the mountains. So Thoreau comes to us out of 
the wilderness with his treasures and we may well 
give him the good welcome he has won among wise 
readers of good books. When Parker Pillsbury 
went to see him as he lay a-dying and said, " Tho- 
reau, you are so near the line now ; tell me whether 
you cannot see something of the other side, some 
glimpse or gleam of the waiting world beyond," 
the old sweet smile came over his face and he said 
cheerily, " One world at a time, Parker ; " and this 
was the watchword, as it seems to me, of his whole 



308 CLEAR GRIT 

life. He only saw one world at a time, but he 
saw that exceeding well. He only took one text 
for all his sermons and it was : 

" To thine own self be true ; 

And it shall follow as the night the day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man." 

But he made all his sermons good to that text and 
true to the end of the years. 

So I say again and finally that we need such 
men as Thoreau in every generation, full to the 
brim and running over with the dissidence of dis- 
sent. Men who will take no man's say-so and cut 
their life by no man's pattern. Men who will 
neither lead nor be led, but will just live their life 
in their own way and then report to us what they 
have found we cannot find, who are content to 
work in the harness or to train in the regiment. 

It is a grand thing even to hear of a young man 
forty to fifty years ago who could deliberately 
turn his back on that tremendous thing we call a 
fortune for the nobler fortune which lay, as he 
believed, in a life of the simplest tastes and de- 
sires. We could have no such city as this, to be 
sure, if we were all to take that turn, but there is 
not the least danger of our taking that turn, while 
the example is simply priceless if it only leads us 
to see that to make a fortune or strike for one is 
not the alpha and omega of our human life. When 
a friend of mine counseled a poor woman to go 
and live in the country that she might win bread 



THOREAU 309 

for her children she said, " I would rather lean 
against a lamp post in New York than have a home 
in the country." Thoreau shows us how the ex- 
change may be made and the profit and pleasure 
may be on the side of the simpler and sweeter life. 
We blot out the line which lies forever deep and 
sure between our needs and our desires. Tho- 
reau scores the line afresh, deep and strong, and 
shows us how many ills may be cured, as the good 
doctor told the alderman of London to cure his 
gout : " Live on sixpence a day, and earn it." 

Young men are tangled up in a network of con- 
ventional usages. A man with no brains, per- 
haps, to speak of, walks down Broadway with a 
hat he brought from Paris on the last steamer. 
You all rush to get a hat like that; or it is a coat 
and you must have the coat ; and so it is with a 
hundred things that cost money, and what is worth 
more than money, independence. You must con- 
form, you say. " Not so," says Thoreau, " I do 
not live to suit my fellows but myself. I will dress 
as I like and do as I like. I will be no man's serf. 
It does not become me to run with the crowd, and 
they may say we will have none of you, but they 
are too late in saying that; they do not ostracize 
me ; I ostracize them." Thousands of young men 
in this city stay poor because they will not draw 
the line between the need and the desire, and a 
clear percentage wreck their lives past all recov- 
ery through this weakness. Thoreau stands for 
the instance that would set every young man if he 



310 CLEAR GRIT 

should follow it, well on his feet and keep him safe 
and sound. He said once, " How can we expect a 
harvest of thought if we have no seed time of 
character? " He was a true and fine thinker be- 
cause he was a true and stanch man. " What do 
I care who refuses to hear me? " Bushnell said 
once, " when I have God for my audience ? " So 
said Thoreau, but he seems to have been content 
with nature, and now and then a man. 

His religion, like his life, was absolutely inde- 
pendent of all our churches and standards of doc- 
trine and ceremonials, and I love to find such a 
man though I could not be of his school. I should 
need a church all the same, if I were not a minister, 
and my Bible and the help that comes to me 
through the man, Christ Jesus. Still I reverence 
such independence as Thoreau's with my whole 
heart, because it was as native to the man as my 
dependence is, and he used it so well. The great 
pines on the Michigan peninsula that stand so 
close together stand greatly through each other's 
sheltering; they are not cabled to the earth like 
that I saw on Lone Tree Hill in Kansas once, that 
had stood the wreck of centuries. So we need to 
have wider spaces between man and man that we 
may send out and downward great roots and stand 
fast in our own simple manhood, and Thoreau 
nobly helps to teach us that secret. 



II 

POEMS 



SAXON GRIT* 

Worn with the battle by Stamford town, 

Fighting the Norman by Hastings Bay, 
Harold, the Saxon's sun, went down. 

While the acorns were falling, one autumn day. 
Then the Norman said, " I am lord of the land ; 

By tenor of conquest here I sit ; 
I will rule you now with the iron hand " — 

But he had not thought of the Saxon grit. 

He took the land, and he took the men. 

And burnt the homesteads from Humber to 
Tyne, 
Made the freemen serfs by a stroke of the pen, 

Ate up the corn and drank the wine. 
And said to the maiden pure and fair, 

" You shall be my leman, as is most fit, 
Your Saxon churl may rot in his lair " — 

But he had not measured the Saxon grit. 

To the merry green wood went bold Robin Hood, 
With his strong-hearted yeomanry ripe for the 
fray. 

Driving the arrow into the marrow 

Of all the proud Normans who came in his way ; 

* Read on " Forefathers' Day " at the banquet of the 
New England Society, in response to the toast, " Saxon 
Grit." 

313 



314 CLEAR GRIT 

Scorning the fetter, fearless and free, 
Winning by valor or foiling by wit, 

Dear to our Saxon folk ever is he. 

This merry old rogue with the Saxon grit. 

And Kett the tanner whipt out his knife, 

And Watt the smith his hammer brought down. 
For ruth of the maid he loved better than life. 

And by breaking a head made a hole in the 
Crown. 
From the Saxon heart rose a mighty roar, 

" Our life shall not be by the king's permit ; 
We will fight for the right we want no more " — 

Then the Norman found out the Saxon grit. 

For slow and sure as the oaks had grown 

From the acorns falling that autumn day, 
So the Saxon manhood in thorpe and town 

To a nobler stature grew alway. 
Winning by inches, holding by clinches, 

Standing by law and the human right. 
Many times failing, never once quailing. 

So the new day came out of the night. 



Then rising afar in the Western sea, 

A new world stood in the mom of the day. 

Ready to welcome the brave and free 

Who could wrench out the heart and march 
away 



POEMS 315 

From the narrow, contracted, dear old land, 
Where the poor are held by a cruel bit, 

To ampler spaces for heart and hand — 
And here was a chance for the Saxon grit. 

Steadily steering, eagerly peering, 

Trusting in God, your fathers came, 
Pilgrims and strangers, fronting all dangers, 

Cool-headed Saxons with hearts aflame. 
Bound by the letter, but free from the fetter. 

And hiding their freedom in Holy Writ, 
They gave Deuteronomy hints in economy. 

And made a new Moses of Saxon Grit. 

They whittled and waded through forest and fen. 

Fearless as ever of what might befall; 
Pouring out life for the nurture of men ; 

In faith that by manhood the world wins all. 
Inventing baked beans, and no end of machines ; 

Great with the rifle and great with the ax — 
Sending their notions over the oceans. 

To fill empty stomachs and straighten bent 
backs. 

Swift to take chances that end in the dollar, 

Yet open of hand when the dollar is made. 
Maintaining the meet'n, exalting the scholar. 

But a little too anxious about a good trade ; 
This is young Jonathan, son of old John, 

Positive, peaceable, firm in the right ; 
Saxon men all of us, may we be one. 

Steady for freedom and strong in her might. 



316 CLEAR GRIT 

Then, slow and sure as the oaks have grown 

From the acorns that fell on the old dim day, 
So this sturdy manhood, in city and town. 

To a nobler stature will grow alway; 
Winning by inches, holding by clinches. 

Slow to contention, and slower to quit. 
Now and then failing, but never once quailing, 

Let us thank God for the Saxon grit. 



UNDER THE SNOW 

A Christmas Memory 

It was Christmas Eve in the year fourteen,* 
And as ancient dalesmen used to tell, 

The wildest winter they ever had seen, 

With the snow lying deep on moor and fell. 

When wagoner John got out his team, 
Smiler and Whitefoot, Duke and Gray, 

With the light in his eyes of a young man's dream, 
As he thought of his wedding on New Year's 
Day 

To Ruth, the maid with the bonnie brown hair, 
And eyes of the deepest, sunniest blue. 

Pleasant and winsome, and wondrous fair, 
And true to her troth, for her heart was true. 

" Thou's surely not gannin ' ! " shouted mine host ; 

" Thou'll be lost in the drift as sure as thou's 
born; 
Thy lass winnot want to wed wi' a ghost. 

And that's what thou'll be on Christmas morn. 

" It's eleven long miles fra' Skipton toon. 
To Blueberg hooses'e Washburn dale; 

Thou had better turn back and sit thee doon. 
And comfort thy heart wi' a drop o' good ale." 

* 1714. 

317 



318 CLEAR GRIT 

Turn the swallows flying south, 

Turn the vines against the sun, 
Herds from rivers in the drouth; 

Men must dare or nothing's done. 

So what cares the lover for storm or drift, 
Or peril of death, on the haggard way? 

He sings to himself, like a lark in the lift. 

And the joy in his heart turns December to 
May. 

But the bitter north wind brings a deadly chill, 
Creeping into the heart, and the drifts are deep ; 

Where the thick of the storm strikes Blueberg 
hill. 
He is weary and falls on a pleasant sleep, 

And dreams he is walking by Washburn side, 
Walking with Ruth, on a summer's day, 

Singing the song to his bonnie bride. 
His own wife now, forever and aye. 

Now read me this riddle, how Ruth should hear 
That song of a heart in the clutch of doom 

Fall on her ear, distinct and clear, 
As if her lover was in the room? 

And read me this riddle, how Ruth should know, 
As she bounds to throw open the heavy door, 

That her lover was lost in the drifting snow. 
Dying or dead, on the great, lone moor? 



POEMS 319 

"Help! Help! Lost! Lost!" 

Rings through the night as she rushes away, 
Stumbling, blinded and tempest-tossed. 

Straight to the drift where her lover lay. 

And swift they leap after her into the night, 

Into the drifts by Blueberg hill, 
Risdale and Robinson, each with a light, 

To find her there holding him, white and still. 

" He was dead in the drift, then," 

I hear them say. 
As I listen in wonder. 

Forgetting to play. 
Fifty years syne come Christmas Day. 

" Nay, nay, they were wed 1 " the yeoman cried ; 

" Wed by t' parson o' New Year's Day ; 
Why, Ruth were me great-great-grandsire's bride. 

And Maister Frankland gave her away." 

" But how did she find him under the snow? " 
They cry through their laughter, touched with 

tears ; 
" Nay, lads," he said softly, " we never can 

know. 
No, not if we live a hundred years. 

" There's a sight o' things gan 
To the making o' man." 
Then I rush to my play 
With a whoop and away, 
Fifty years syne come Christmas Day. 



THE LEGEND OF THE TWO KINGS * 

" The younger son of the All Father is King of 
the Forge." — Ancient Saga, 

It was long ago and far away, 

In a summer palace — the legends say ; 

Where the fragrance of roses and new mown hay 

Was borne on the wind, while the plash and play 

Of water, from fountains sweet and clear. 

Rose and fell on the listening ear. 

And the singing of birds, with the murmur of bees, 

Hidden away in the mulberry trees. 

Stole through a room where one lay still. 

The king of the land, on whose royal will 

All men waited in fear and awe. 

For the king was the fountain of life and law. 

He had sat in his hall through the morning tide. 
While the folk had come from far and wide, 
To th^ seat of justice, a wondrous throng. 
That the king might judge between right and 

wrong 
In each man's case, and make due award ; 
While on right and left stood the royal guard. 
Silent and stern with bated breath, 
To do his bidding for life or death. 

* Read at a convention of Smiths in Illinois. 
320 



POEMS 3^1 

But now he was tired and wanted a nap, 
Just forty winks, so he donned his cap, 
Silken and soft in exchange for his crown, 
Covered himself with a quilt of down. 
Said, " This feels nice," and shut his eyes, 
Bid them close the lattice to keep out the flies ; 
And let none disturb him on peril of doom, 
In the cool retreat of his darkened room. 

But the king was to have no nap that day, 

Tirpd as he was and falling away 

To a slumber as sweet as labor can bring. 

For right through the silence came the ring 

Of many hammers struck on steel. 

Many and mighty, peal on peal 

Of stalwart strokes, from beyond the trees. 

Drowning the murmur of water and bees. 

And the singing of birds in the drowse of the day. 

On the summer wind from the mountain gorge, 

Where the master smith had built his forge. 

Now this was the way the story ran : 
That before the times the oldest man 
Could remember, there had been a forge 
Standing there by the mountain gorge, 
Manned by the smiths from father to son. 
Steadily held and honestly won; 
Workers in iron since the day 
When the old bronze age had passed away ; 
Shoeing the horse, and forging the brand 
Strong and sure for the soldier's hand; 



S22 CLEAR GRIT 

Turning the share, and tireing the wheel, 

Master workmen in iron and steel. 

There they had stood from the oldest time, 

Toiling and moiling in smoke and grime. 

Upright and downright, steady and true. 

Doing the work GOD gave them to do; 

While the land had been held by chartered right. 

Two hundred years — and maintained by right 

Of their good right hand, from father to son. 

Steadily held as honestly won. 

So that clear as the right of the king to his crown. 

Was the right of the smith to have and to own 

Homestead and smithy, garden and croft, 

With all below and all aloft; 

As high as the stars and as deep as the fires, 

Full and free as the heart's desires ; 

So ran the charter, fair to see. 

Dated 1010 a. d. 

But might makes right when kings grow white 

With anger, and the lurid light 

Burns in their eyes men fear to see. 

Bending before the majesty 

Of one whose wrath is as the path 

Of the lion, from which all things flee. 

He tossed the cover away from his couch, 

And they say he swore, but I will not vouch 

For that, though we read kings have been known 

To swear in their wrath like the veriest clown. 

I only know he called the guard, 

Whose place it was to keep watch and ward, 



POEMS 32S 

Bid them go forth and raze to the ground 
That forge, until no stone was found 
To stand on another, and bring the smith 
Into the royal presence forthwith, 
To hear his doom, who had dared to make 
This clamor, and keep their king awake. 
So, alas for the day, if " What shall he say 
Who comes after the king " be Bible true. 
For what shall befall, be you freeman or thrall, 
When the king in his wrath comes after you.? 
Swiftly the guard went up to the glen, 
To bring the smith with his stalwart men 
Into the presence of majesty — 
And they answered no word, but quietly 
Came forth of the smithy into the hall. 
And ranged themselves against the wall. 
With leathern apron and grimy face. 
Each man stood in his proper place, 
Forgemen and strikers, a hundred strong. 
To fight the battle of right with wrong; 
While the folk flocked in from far and near, 
Strong in courage or stricken with fear; 
They crowded the palace to hear and see 
How the smith would answer his majesty. 

And this was the way he answered the king: 
" If might makes right, then my anvil's ring 
Must be heard all the same in this good free land, 
For no royal word can stay the hand 
Of the smith in his forge, or royal might 
Silence anvil and hammer. I stand on my right. 



^U CLEAR GRIT 

In the great old time they made this rhyme, 
And carved it in runes on a stone: 

' By hammer and hand 

All things do stand.' 
So I counsel thee let us alone ; 
And if thou would'st sleep while we work all day, 
Move thy new palace out of my way ; 
For the smith in his forge is also a king. 
No matter what may befall, 
And when his hammer ceases to ring, 
Thy kingdom will go to the wall. 

" Who shoes the horses, and forges the brand 
Strong and sure for thy soldiers' hand. 
That the foe may be met in the battle array? 
The master smith and his men alway. 
Who turns the share and tires the wheel? 
The master workman in iron and steel. 
Who forges the tools for mason and wright. 
To build thy walls, whose massive might 
Defies the foe and the tooth of time? 
The men of my craft for whose sake the rhyme 
Was made and carven on the stone. 
The master smith and his men alone. 
There is my answer — now what say ye. 
Free-born men to his majesty? " 

It was long ago and far away. 
To the east of sunrise — the legends say. 
When this thing was done on a summer's day ; 
And from that time forth, for ever and aye. 



POEMS 325 

This law was laid down for each and all, 

King and commoner, freeman or thrall; 

That wherever the smith shall set his forge. 

In town or hill or by mountain gorge. 

Holding the same by lawful right, 

And honestly working with the might 

Of his good right hand ; 

Then no matter what clamor 

He may happen to make with his anvil and 

hammer, 
He shall still be free to hold his own. 
And be proud of his cap as the king of his crown ; 
Because, but for his making no thing could be 

made. 
And so none shall molest him or make him afraid ; 
So the folk-mote laid down the law, and then 
It was signed and sealed with the great Amen! 



HYMN 

Unto thy temple, Lord, we come 
With thankful hearts to worship thee; 
And pray that this may be our home 
Until we touch eternity : — 

The common home of rich and poor, 
Of bond and free, and great and small; 
Large as thy love for evermore. 
And warm and bright and good to all. 

And dwell thou with us in this place, 
Thou and thy Christ, to guide and bless ! 
Here make the well-springs of thy grace 
Like fountains in the wilderness. 

May thy whole truth be spoken here; 
Thy gospel light forever shine; 
Thy perfect love cast out all fear, 
And human life become divine. 



326 



HYMN* 

O Lord our God, when storm and flame 
Hurled homes and temples into dust, 

We gathered here to bless thy name. 
And on our ruin wrote our trust. 

Thy tender pity met our pain; 

Swift through the world thine angels ran; 
And then thy Christ appeared again. 

Incarnate in the heart of man. 

Thy lightning lent its burning wing 
To bear the tear-blent sympathy, 

And fiery chariots rushed to bring 
The offerings of humanity. 

Thy tender pity met our pain, 

Thy love has raised us from the dust ; 

We meet to bless thee. Lord, again, 
And in our temple sing our trust. 

* Written for the dedication of the new Unity Church in 
Chicago, built after the great fire. 



327 



LUCRETIA MOTT 

Some human lives seem blended all of gloom, 
Bitter as Marah — sown with doubts and fears, 
Death gathers into sheaves of blasted ears 
And burns to ashes in the fire of doom. 

And some seem blent of sunshine, brief but fair 
As days in April, bound about with frost 
The budding promise withers and is lost, 
And all the summer dips toward despair. 

But this great woman fell on fruitful days. 
They ran through all the seasons of her life — 
Childhood and youth, and then the happy wife 
And gracious mother all her children praise. 

Steadfast in duty, high and wide of thought, 
Loyal in friendship, tender in her love. 
Pure in her heart as those who dwell above. 
Herself the ensample of the truth she taught. 

Farewell, dear friend! This world so long thy 

home 
Is richer for thy presence and thy grace. 
Blessed are they who, with thee, see God's face ; 
Blessed art thou, who to thine own hast come. 



338 



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